[lihaoyi]

"I understand macros to provide two things (1) forced code in-lining and (2) a kind of non-strict semantics or lazy evaluation of arguments"

False. There isn't much else to say, but if this is all he thinks macros are about, he doesn't know anything about them, their uses, or their potentials.

Macros would basically take a large amount of nasty extra-lingual stuff (code-generation, byte-code generation, compiler plugins) and codify it into a systematic, easier to use and easier to understand framework.

F#-style Type Providers? Compile-time typechecked regex literals? Compile-time typechecked html? Compile-time typechecked CSS? This sort of thing is already being done (see Play!) and is pure awesome as a user (i <3 the type-checked HTML templates) but the implementation involves a huge amount of mysterious extra compilation steps and magic that macros could help simplify and codify.