Please show an example of using macro-alias, if you had a working version :)
I expect you want
,',b
Imagine the variable "b" contains the symbol "foo". You want to insert (the first comma) the symbol "foo" (,foo) but that would treat foo like a variable, so you have to quote it (,'foo) to get a literal "foo".
Now you want to substitute the value of b for foo, so replace foo with (,b).
,'foo
foo => ,b
,',b
Why one quote instead of two?
,','b
That's because you don't want a literal "b", you want the value the variable "b" contains.
Why one quote instead of zero?
,,b
because you don't want the value of the variable "foo" when b contains the symbol foo, you want a literal foo.
Why do you have to use ,' at all? After all
`(one two three)
inserts literal symbols without any messing around. But now you have no way to evaluate anything.
Imagine that symbols didn't "auto quote" themselves in a quasiquotation expression. That is, suppose that `(one two three) was an error. Just wasn't implemented. So you had to write
`(,'one ,'two ,'there)
now it's easier to see where ,',b comes from.
Wow, this is pretty cool. I've never had a way to explain ,', before ^_^
I successfully applied your thinking to make args a gensym:
(mac macro-alias(a b)
(w/uniq args
`(mac ,a ,args
`(,',b ,@,args))))
This works like alias at http://arclanguage.org/item?id=13097 for macros. (It would also works on functions, but macro-aliases of functions are not first-class functions.)
