Tcl has that. Early lisps did too, sometimes called fexpr or fsubr. More recently Kernel had the same. There's another esoteric lisp that does too but the name

Tcl has that. Early lisps did too, sometimes called fexpr or fsubr. More recently Kernel had the same. There's another esoteric lisp that does too but the name escapes me. That's a pretty compelling answer to why it doesn't need macros though. It's got the upgraded version built in. I believe that is amenable to the same style of speculative compilation found in jit compilers for dynamic languages. The above reference to graalvm does seem a good idea in that context. I can't point to an existence proof though. edit: someone is going to object to "upgraded macro", but nevertheless lisp macros are exactly the subset of fexpr that can be statically resolved at compile time, i.e. a subset of a more powerful facility.