Aw nuts, missing parenthesis, then realized that Arc parameter forms aren't straightforward lists but have a nasty (o ...) syntax. Here's a more complex form:
Now I see -- that's great, thanks. (It was the missing UNIQ that
got me, I can add parens :))
I think that if we kept going down this direction we would
eventually come up with a macro system that was "hygienic in
practice". Building a good and simple hygienic macro system is a
very achievable goal.
All I really want to say is that there isn't a trivial silver
bullet solution: A simple module system doesn't fix name
collision. A simple code walker doesn't fix it (it needs
integration with the environment.)
I eagerly await the version of Arc that has a macro system where
name collision can be avoided.
These are very hard to get right without hooks into the Lisp
environment (at least they are for me!). For example, we always
uniqify the variable names, but sometimes that doesn't do what we
want. Consider:
On assertions: it would really be nice to have at least just one extra namespace for local variables, I suppose, with printnames that are the same as the global namespace. new-fn then translates from symbols in the global namespace (which is what read should always emit) to local variable namespace. Aw crick, it's a hard problem.
Also, current bug with this implementation: (fn (do) `(do ,do)) will fail, I'll need to analyze do. And stuff like (fn (b) (tag b (prn "foo"))).
