For purposes of writing macros, CL seems to be identical to Arc, other than the name for the macro-defining construct ("defmacro" instead of "mac"). Which, of

For purposes of writing macros, CL seems to be identical to Arc, other than the name for the macro-defining construct ("defmacro" instead of "mac"). Which, of course, can be fixed with a macro. There are three "things" about Racket's macro system: hygiene, pattern-matching, and phases. The sort of built-for-you way to do things (define-syntax with syntax-rules or syntax-case) is both hygienic and pattern-matching-based. But you can also make something that is hygienic but not pattern-based, or pattern-based but not hygienic, or neither; this last one is done for you in the library "mzlib/defmacro". However, what you can't do, at least not without doing something like creating a new file and inserting (require (for-meta 2 <new file>)), is define a macro that you use in a macro body. For example, if you wanted to define "w/uniq", so that you could write (define-macro (swap a b) (w/uniq tmp ;instead of (let ((tmp (gensym))) `(let ((,tmp ,a)) ...etc Simply writing (define-macro (w/uniq var . body) ...) will not work; a macro must be defined at phase level 2 for it to be used by a macro that is defined at phase level 1 (which is when macros are normally defined). And I have not succeeded in finding any way to make this work other than, as I said, creating another file and requiring it. (And, of course, if you want to use anything that isn't base Racket when defining 'w/uniq or whatever, you'll have to require that somehow, or do without.) This might be a minor complaint, but it does annoy me. See also: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11529 http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11529