Article author here. I don't actually remember why I found syntax-rules confusing, although I can make a couple of guesses: 1. Doing simple things with syntax-

Article author here. I don't actually remember why I found syntax-rules confusing, although I can make a couple of guesses: 1. Doing simple things with syntax-rules is simple, and that's most of what you use syntax-rules for, but it is actually possible to do very powerful things with it (Oleg Kiselyov has done terrifying things with it, for example). However, doing this is rather involved and complex. 2. Perhaps I preferred the conceptual simplicity of the lisp model that "a macro is just a function that returns an s-expression". syntax-rules is "yet another language" to learn (albeit a very simple one), while macros just reuse the lisp functions you already know. I hadn't seen Chicken's "implicit-renaming macros" until now, so thanks for the link!