But couldn't you decide that any macro was only evaluated once (so the my-oper in my-function wouldn't change), but macros were searched for in the lexical namespace anyway? This would mean that any call with a lexical in the functional position would have to be checked for macro-expansions at runtime, of course, but it would be slightly more reasonable.
Yes, but again: compilation during runtime. Meaning (most likely) some sort of JIT. Wanna try to implement this? You could start by hacking this onto pg's arc-to-scheme implementation.
Okay. Be careful to still be able to properly handle environments, without actually turning it into an Arc interpreter.
pg's ArcN is really an Arc-to-Scheme compiler. And I dearly suspect that this was the main reason for not implementing first-class macros. Macros are intended to work on the code before the compiler does, so having true first-class macros is a little difficult.
