No, really, macros, being essentially compilers, give you enough power to build everything you'd ever want into Lisp, including "hygienic" macros, and even to build facilities to write hof-like things in less painful ways.

Obviously I like unhygienic macros when they are necessary. The problem is, I keep writing higher-order functions and getting tired of typing the "fn" over and over, and then I have to convert the function to a macro, making it twice as long and hard to read. Hygienic macros help, but they still are not as easy to write as plain functions.

I know I'm not the only person who has this problem, but maybe I'm the only one who realizes I have this problem. I see people on the Internet raving about the AMAZING POWER of macros, and most of their examples are just higher-order functions with some small cosmetic changes. Most of the macros in Arc are of the same kind.

I'm not denying that macros are powerful. I just think there is a gross inefficiency in using them where you shouldn't have to, just because of minor syntactic concerns.

I wanted to solve this with a short, clean syntax for function literals, but I haven't been able to come up with one and neither, apparently, has anyone else. So instead I decided to try something that would generate macros out of HOFs.

Now, maybe that's a bad idea; instead, we could redefine the brackets, so that a pipe divides args and body, and if it doesn't have a pipe, it defaults to binding _ ? I don't know how hard that would be, or some variation on the concept, but it would be a bit shorter than (fn (args) (body)), if you don't want to type that all the time.

  [params || body]

  (make-br-fn (params || body))

  (let old (rep make-br-fn)
    (= make-br-fn
       (annotate 'mac
         (fn (l)
           (if (some '|| l)
               (do
                 your-stuff)
               (old l))))))

Other possibilities, in no particular order:

  [ # ]
  [ - ]
  [ = ]
  [ -> ]
  [ : ]
  [ => ]
  [ > ]
  [ ~ ]
  [ % ]
  [ ! ]
  [ $ ]
  [ ^ ]
  [ & ]
  [ * ]
  [ @ ]
  [ + ]
  [ | ]
  [ || ]
  [ ? ]

# can't be redefined

Let's try some mockups:

  [ a b c :
    (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (+ (* b b) (* 4 a c))))
       (* 2 a))]

  [: (thunk this)]

  [ a b c ->
    (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (+ (* b b) (* 4 a c))))
       (* 2 a))]

  [-> (thunk this)]

  [ a b c =>
    (/ (+ (- b) (sqrt (+ (* b b) (* 4 a c))))
       (* 2 a))]

  [=> (thunk this)]

  [foo [bar]]

  (make-br-fn (foo (make-br-fn (bar))))

  (given ; this gives us access to the old
         ; implementation of [] syntax; it
         ; is used when we don't find the
         ; separator
         old (rep make-br-fn)
         ; use a variable to easily change
         ; the separator
         separator ': ;for experimentation
    (= make-br-fn
       ; a macro is just a function that has
       ; been tagged (or annotated) with the
       ; symbol 'mac
       (annotate 'mac
         ; the reader reads [...] as
         ; (make-br-fn (...))
         (fn (rest)
               ; find the separator
           (if (some separator rest)
               ; note the use of the s-variant givens
               ; the "s" at the end of the name of givens
               ; means that the variables are specifically
               ; bound in order, and that succeeding variables
               ; may refer to earlier ones
               (givens ; scans through the list, returning
                       ; an index for use with split
                       ; (no built-in function does this)
                       scan
                       (fn (l)
                         ((afn (l i)
                            (if (caris l separator)
                                i
                                (self (cdr l) (+ i 1))))
                          l 0))
                       ; now do the scan
                       i (scan rest)
                       ; this part destructures a two-element
                       ; list
                       (params body)
                         ; used to get around a bug in split
                         (if (isnt i 0)
                             (split rest i)
                             (list nil rest))
                 ; it just becomes an ordinary function
                              ; body includes the separator,
                              ; so we also cut it out
                 `(fn ,params ,@(cut body 1)))
               ; pass it to the old version of make-br-fn
               ; if a separator was not found
               (old rest))))))

  (= foo [ i :
           [ : i]])

  ((foo 42))

  (read-accept-bar-quote #f)

  {| body}