> It should be possible for tooling to just show you the expansion of any given macro invocation. In fact, when I used Clojure a decade ago, there was an Emacs

> It should be possible for tooling to just show you the expansion of any given macro invocation. In fact, when I used Clojure a decade ago, there was an Emacs command that would expand the macro invocation under your cursor, so you could see what code was actually being generated. Exactly. On common lisp, for example, it's just a keypress, and it has a "macro stepper" so it shows the first expansion possible, then the second expansion, and so on and so on... until you end up with compiler primitives!