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by progman 3334 days ago
Side effects are no issue if every local variable name in a defmacro is generated with (gensym).
2 comments

And if you're tired of doing that by hand, you can... write a macro that'll do that for you. In fact, those were already written, and are available in many libraries as well as featured in many books.

See e.g. Alexandria[0] for with-gensyms (automatically binding your variables to gensyms) and once-only (similar, but ensures the value will be evaluated only once).

Also note that lack of hygiene is actually a useful feature - it allows macros to capture variables from code passed to it as well as the environment they expand it. Some cool stuff can be done that way (some uncool foot-shooting too, though).

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[0] - https://common-lisp.net/project/alexandria/draft/alexandria....

> Also note that lack of hygiene is actually a useful feature - it allows macros to capture variables from code passed to it as well as the environment they expand it. Some cool stuff can be done that way (some uncool foot-shooting too, though).

Doug Hoyte's excellent book _Let Over Lambda_ has a lot of examples.

Oh yes. This book is very fun, in the "what on Earth did he just do here" kind of way.
Syntax-case allows you to introduce bindings into the lexical context (breaking hygiene in a very controlled manner). It does not work with lists, but with syntax objects.
Exactly, you have to specify what you want. Evaluating an expression argument multiple times is probably a mistake, as is not having a new gensym for local variables ... until it is not, e.g. for anaphoric macros (binding some value to "it", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro, you can still argue that that's bad style of course).