DEFMACRO

As you saw in Chapter 3, macros really are defined with **DEFMACRO** forms, though it stands—of course—for DEFine MACRO, not Definition for Mac. The basic skeleton of a **DEFMACRO** is quite similar to the skeleton of a **DEFUN**.

(defmacro name (parameter*)
  "Optional documentation string."
  body-form*)

Like a function, a macro consists of a name, a parameter list, an optional documentation string, and a body of Lisp expressions.1 However, as I just discussed, the job of a macro isn’t to do anything directly—its job is to generate code that will later do what you want.

Macros can use the full power of Lisp to generate their expansion, which means in this chapter I can only scratch the surface of what you can do with macros. I can, however, describe a general process for writing macros that works for all macros from the simplest to the most complex.

The job of a macro is to translate a macro form—in other words, a Lisp form whose first element is the name of the macro—into code that does a particular thing. Sometimes you write a macro starting with the code you’d like to be able to write, that is, with an example macro form. Other times you decide to write a macro after you’ve written the same pattern of code several times and realize you can make your code clearer by abstracting the pattern.

Regardless of which end you start from, you need to figure out the other end before you can start writing a macro: you need to know both where you’re coming from and where you’re going before you can hope to write code to do it automatically. Thus, the first step of writing a macro is to write at least one example of a call to the macro and the code into which that call should expand.

Once you have an example call and the desired expansion, you’re ready for the second step: writing the actual macro code. For simple macros this will be a trivial matter of writing a backquoted template with the macro parameters plugged into the right places. Complex macros will be significant programs in their own right, complete with helper functions and data structures.

After you’ve written code to translate the example call to the appropriate expansion, you need to make sure the abstraction the macro provides doesn’t “leak” details of its implementation. Leaky macro abstractions will work fine for certain arguments but not others or will interact with code in the calling environment in undesirable ways. As it turns out, macros can leak in a small handful of ways, all of which are easily avoided as long as you know to check for them. I’ll discuss how in the section “Plugging the Leaks.”

To sum up, the steps to writing a macro are as follows:

1. Write a sample call to the macro and the code it should expand into, or vice versa.
2. Write code that generates the handwritten expansion from the arguments in the sample call.
3. Make sure the macro abstraction doesn’t “leak.”