They can't directly substitute for macros because they run when execution reaches them, rather than once at load time, and because they can't inspect their code

They can't directly substitute for macros because they run when execution reaches them, rather than once at load time, and because they can't inspect their code arguments. But they do satisfy a lot of the desire for syntactic abstraction -- see e.g. https://github.com/erights/quasiParserGenerator https://github.com/erights/quasiParserGenerator