>You should check out Racket's macro system. It's a lot more sophisticated than Common Lisp's. Common Lisp macros are to C (e.g., gensym is a macro-level malloc

>You should check out Racket's macro system. It's a lot more sophisticated than Common Lisp's. Common Lisp macros are to C (e.g., gensym is a macro-level malloc, you need to manually destructure S-expressions, etc.) as Racket macros are to ML and Haskell (syntax objects are aware of which variables are in scope, so automatic fresh name generation is possible; user-defined syntax classes and patterns let you process arbitrarily complicated structures in a sane way, etc.). If you like the idea of metaprogramming, but `defmacro` left you with a bad taste in the mouth, Racket is totally the language for you. Better yet, check out some other schemes. ir, er, and sc macros has the raw procedurual power of defmacro, but with the hygene and safety of syntax-case/syntax-rules, without the declarative syntax of syntax-rules, and the disadvantages of syntax-case (stupidly complex, breaking the standard macro abstraction with syntax/datum distinctions, etc.). Given, syntax-case has some advantages, but I don't think it carries its own weight from a programmer's perspective.