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by TeMPOraL 3334 days ago
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....

2 comments

> 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.