I've used macros for years, decades ago. I don't like them, and I was disappointed to see them so widely employed by Rust. I've written macros in asm, in TeX,

I've used macros for years, decades ago. I don't like them, and I was disappointed to see them so widely employed by Rust. I've written macros in asm, in TeX, in Lisp, and even in TRAC (a macro based programming language invented by Calvin Moores in the 60's, see [1]). The most impressive macros I've used are found in the fantastic LaTeX graphics package named tikz. The manual for tikz is 391 pages long. This amazing graphics package is implemented in LaTeX and TeX macros. So if tikz is so great, what's wrong with macros? The tikz package is great in spite of being implemented in macros. Looking over its implementation, I'm stunned that its developers were able to achieve it. Macros are used because they abstract a mechanism that programmers would like to use, but macros easily become leaky abstractions. They can easily have semantics that depend on or affect other program elements that are not visible to the programmer. Macros can be written using other macros; macros can define new macros. Consequently, even simple macro systems (like the C preprocessor) are capable of doing any kind of a computation [3]. These machinations are not visible to the programmer using the macros so macros make accurate reasoning about the correctness of a program more difficult in the same way that subroutines having unrestricted access to global variables make correctness harder to (informally) verify. Abstraction has proven to be an essential means for constructing programs. No one wants to program in an environment where goto's in a flat namespace replace all functions. I feel like macros are a flawed mechanism for abstraction; I would rather see the language syntax expanded to accommodate the desired features than to have them implemented via macros. As impressive as the capabilities of macros are [4], wouldn't it be better to rely on functions as the primary abstraction mechanism used by the language's programmers. Am I wrong? [1] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365230.365270 https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/365230.365270 [2] http://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf http://www.bu.edu/math/files/2013/08/tikzpgfmanual.pdf [3] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3136686/is-the-c99-preprocessor-turing-complete https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3136686/is-the-c99-prepr... [4] https://letoverlambda.com https://letoverlambda.com