Clemens> sperber(a)informatik.uni-tuebingen.de (Michael Sperber [Mr. Preprocessor]) writes: Clemens> What help do you mean? The help hygienic macros give you: an identifier always refers to its lexically enclosing binding. Clemens> Nobody claimed that. I wanted to make the point that it is quite easy Clemens> to define hygienic macros in CL. Huh? Re-read your sentence, please. Clemens> (I don't understand your last sentence.) What you're doing is renaming variables so that they are unique. This means that you avoid name clashes with other names. This still doesn't mean an identifier in a macro has the same semantics as everywhere else. It merely means that you simulate the semantics in some cases. You don't in others. Holger and I have exchanged examples in this very thread. Clemens> Where do I need explicit annotations? At definition time, I Clemens> say which hygienic variables I want. This is an explicit Clemens> annotation. And you have to write an unquote before every use. This means you have annotations everywhere. Clemens> On the other hand, I don't think that in Scheme you can say Clemens> you want this and that variable *not* to be hygienic. No, but (to quote Craig in this discussion :-}) why would you want this? Kidding aside, the real peeve may be with the limitations a pattern language imposes upon you. However, I've so far always found a way to make do with it. Clemens> In CL you can have both behaviours, in Scheme only one. As I explained, in CL you only have the non-hygienic option. You can hack around it, but it's still not going to do the right thing in all cases. -- Cheers =8-} Chipsy Friede, Völkerverständigung und überhaupt blabla