How would using ampersand over dot make macro writing much easier? Is it just that you find the notation more intuitive, or is there something else?
Personally I prefer the dot because I think it looks less jarring and there's the connection with improper lists, as pg mentions in the tutorial (http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt):
(These conventions are not as random as they seem. The parameter
list mirrors the form of the arguments, and a list terminated by
something other than nil is represented as e.g. (a b . c).)
So your real question is why dots don't work in quasiquote, and what should be done to fix them. That's a question that we can relate to a lot better than what we originally thought was "I don't like dots"
Would someone mind being more explicit about how it doesn't work? After dotting the outer definition's rest parameter as well so that the first line reads,