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What you're talking about can still be done without macros, in fact AFAIK REBOL is known for exactly that.

> Because using macros is one way to implement simple, nice, clean, maintainable eDSLs.

FTFY

It can be done without macros, but any such solution (fexprs included) would be much worse than a macro-based one. Much more complicated, much less efficient, etc.

Meh, not necessarily. Lazy by default gives you a lot of good stuff. We shouldn't assume that macros can't be done better anyway.

It is very hard to reason about the laziness, unfortunately, so it is more of a beautiful hack most often rather than a sustainable design methodology. While with macros you've got a very simple, reproducible, verifiable design methodology for constructing arbitrarily complex DSLs.

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