My point was more than one isn't usually missing much by being limited to writing hygienic macros. I don't think anyone is disputing the power of macros; it's t

My point was more than one isn't usually missing much by being limited to writing hygienic macros. I don't think anyone is disputing the power of macros; it's the power/cost of hygiene violation that people are discussing. Someone could give a "trust the programmer" argument for making unhygienic macros available in a language, but that nostrum is problematic because there are two programmers: the macro writer and the macro user. It's harder than you think to write a macro using DEFMACRO that always behaves the way a user might expect it to behave, and as a user of a macro, you need to wonder how hard the macro writer worked to protect you -- something that I don't like as a fan of black boxes.