I agree with this. Compare it with having naming and anaphoric macros: iflet and aif, rfn and afn, even fn and []; I'd add awhile and whilet to the list even though awhile isn't in official Arc, and fromfile, tofile, and ontofile[1].

In fact, it is a very general practice in (functional?) programming to first write a function that handles something basic, then write another function on top of it that's more pleasant to work with. It really is ubiquitous. It's good because it separates the primitives from the high-level interfaces; if you want to change the primitives, you don't need to concern yourself with the high-level interface, and if you want to change the high-level interface, you don't need to concern yourself with the primitives. And macros give you flexibility, the ability to construct pleasant interfaces in ways you can't do with pure functions; for example, functions must evaluate all their arguments once, from left to right, while macros don't have to.

In this case, I don't think we have a function that directly does what you're asking for (i.e. it operates like obj except it evaluates the keys). I consider this a problem. Note that in Scheme and CL, we can go (vector x y z) instead of crap like (let u (make-vector 3) (= u.0 x u.1 y u.2 z) u). We should likewise have a good table-constructing function even if it isn't strictly necessary as a primitive. At the moment, this is the closest we have:

  (apply listtab (pair:list 'a 1 'b 2))
  =
  (obj a 1 b 2)

  (def ???? args
    (apply listtab pair.args)) 

  (xdef table (lambda args
                (let ((h (make-hash-table 'equal)))
                  (if (pair? args) ((car args) h))
                  h)))
  --ac.scm

  (table 
     [each ip ips
       (= (_ ip) (dedup (map !by (+ (bads ip) (goods ip)))))]))

  (table [each-loaded-item i
           (awhen (and i!dead (check (sitename i!url) banned-sites*))
             (push i (_ it)))]))

  (let u (table)
     (each ip ips
        (= (u ip) ...))
     u)

  (w/table u
     (each ip ips
        (= (u ip) ...)))

So. Options: (1) Have table do alternating key-value stuff; if there's one argument remaining at the end, apply it to the table; then return the table. (2) Have table do alternating key-value stuff; signal an error if there's an odd number of arguments [and Paul Graham can get used to w/table], or (2a) if there's one argument, apply that function to the table, while if there are an odd number ≥3 of arguments, signal an error. (3) Leave table as is, and find a new name for our function.

I think (1) is the best thing to do at the moment, and (2) is probably a better future goal but I would be fine being overruled on that (its single advantage is error-reporting when you accidentally give table an odd number of arguments). I think (2a) is a stupid hack and (3) is bad. As such, here is an implementation of (1). Replace the old '(xdef table ...' definition in ac.scm with the following:

  (xdef table (lambda args
                (let ((h (make-hash-table 'equal)))
                  (define (slave xs)
                    (cond ((null? xs) 'nonce)
                          ((null? (cdr xs))
                           ((car xs) h))
                          (else (hash-table-put! h (car xs) (cadr xs))
                                (slave (cddr xs)))))
                  (slave args)
                  h)))
  ;Usage
  arc> (table)
  #hash()
  arc> (table [= _!a 1 _!b 2])
  #hash((a . 1) (b . 2))
  arc> (table 'a 1 'b 2)
  #hash((a . 1) (b . 2))
  arc> (table 'a 1 'b 2 [= _!b 3 _!c 4])
  #hash((a . 1) (b . 3) (c . 4))