Reducing indentation is mostly a non-goal in Lisp. Can't work with nested lists? Don't use Lisp. Lisp processes nested lists. Lisp means List Processor. You ma

Reducing indentation is mostly a non-goal in Lisp. Can't work with nested lists? Don't use Lisp. Lisp processes nested lists. Lisp means List Processor. You may want to do it in a text oriented language, but not so much in an expression oriented language, where programmers edit an expression tree, by tree manipulation commands. In Lisp the "tree" is "nested lists". Btw., what does (block (when (foo) (var first-thing 'EXAMPLE)) (do-something) (var foo 'EXAMPLE) (do-something-else)) mean? Is it legal? Your macro would need to traverse the expression tree, knowing the whole Lisp syntax, including expanding macros, possibly in a source interpreter. WHEN is a macro. BLOCK would need to find the VAR expression inside the WHEN macro, which is not easy for the general case. This would be very very strange. Macros are usually expanded outside to inside. Your BLOCK macro would need to expand macros in enclosed code, to find VAR expressions. In JavaScript something like above is legal in a function.