Having both fexprs and macros

Lexically-scoped fexprs and first-class environments make it simple to do hygienic metaprogramming, using less machinery than hygienic macro systems, and they also require less concepts in the language: there is no need to specify a preprocessing phase.

The downside is that fexprs always incur an interpretative overhead with current technology. Many are convinced that those fexprs that do similar things to what macros do can be partially evaluated: "my research in static analysis leads me to believe that we will be able to erase that overhead for the common case--where first-class macros are used to do the job of compile-time macros" writes Matt Might, for example.

In my new language, Wat, I've implemented both fexprs and macros. Macros are expanded at runtime, when they are first encountered, and their result is memoized in the syntax tree, a technique described in two interesting articles (1, 2) related to the SCM Scheme implementation.

In Wat, MACRO is a special form that can be wrapped around a combiner, and causes calls to that combiner to be memoized in the source tree. An example, LET:

(def let
  (macro (vau (bindings . body) #ign
           (cons (list* lambda (map car bindings) body)
                 (map cadr bindings)))))

With a bit of sugar, one can write macros that look almost like in Common Lisp:

(define-macro (until test . body)
  (list* while (list not test) body))

Macros complicate the language quite a bit; but used in moderation, especially for forms like LET that are basically never changed nor used in a higher-order fashion, they should be unproblematic, and offer a nice speed boost. Fexprs should be used for more complex tasks that require special attention to hygiene, or need to do things that macros can't do, whereas macros could be used for simple transformation and processing tasks, such as UNTIL, above.

Oh, and it should also be noted that these macros enjoy a nice level of hygiene already, by virtue of first-class environments and first-class combiners. For example, UNTIL above doesn't insert the symbols WHILE or NOT into the generated code - it inserts the actual values, therefore being protected from variable shadowing by calling code.