Wow, that's confusing. I was hoping that #` and #, could fully replace ` and , (at least in macros), so you don't have to juggle the two kinds of quasiquote.
Would it be possible to write an mappend that joins hygienically-quoted lists? It would return an ordinary list with each element inside a closure. Then we could write the first example without using the ordinary quasiquote.
Ok, I think I get it now. If we gave hygienically-quoted expressions to mappend, they would be in a different closure than the surrounding code and therefore couldn't see the variables it introduced (r, in our case). So I guess you might say that #` should usually be used at the start of a macro, and ` after that. Still confusing.
It's true, it's not quite as intuitive as I'd like it to be: I, too, originally envisioned it entirely replacing normal quasiquoting for macros, but this turned out more difficult than I expected. It might be possible to make it more intuitive, but at the moment I'm not really working on it; this is an after-the-fact explanation more than a design document. I'm presently in the process of creating a low-level systems programming language with Arc (or at least a Lisp) as its metalanguage; when I get the the problem of adding macros to that language I'll probably give this another look.
