I think what I describe there pretty much meshes with what you and waterhouse are describing here. :)

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"And then "anarki-test" would be evaluated at compile time? Hmm..."

Yeah, I think basically every instance of local macros I've seen involves evaluating the expression at compile time.

That's even what Racket's `let-syntax` does, although in Racket's case it involves a little more detail since Racket enforces a strict separation between compile-time and run-time side effects. When Racket evaluates the expression at compile time (usually, in phase level 1) it first expands that expression in the phase level corresponding to the compile time of the compile time (phase level 2), and if that expression contains another `let-syntax`, then it starts expanding an expression in phase level 3 and so on.

Arc evaluates and expands everything in one phase, as far as Racket is concerned. It would make sense for `lexical-macro` to do its evaluation in the same phase too.

I notice Common Lisp's `macrolet` allows[1] inner `macrolet` macros to depend on outer ones, like this:

  (lexical-macro (foo) ''world
    (lexical-macro (bar) `(sym:+ "hello-" ,(foo))
      (bar)))
  ; could return the symbol 'hello-world

[1] http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/s_flet...

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Here's a different take on the local macro concept by almkglor 10 years ago: http://arclanguage.org/item?id=3085

That implementation, `macwith`, is still around on Anarki's arc2.master branch, in the file lib/macrolet.arc: https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/blob/af5b756e983807ba6...

It works by traversing the body s-expressions and expanding all occurrences it finds, leaving anything else alone. I think this means it tends to break if the code ever contains a list that looks like a call to that macro but isn't supposed to be, such as a quoted occurrence like '(my-macro), a binding occurrence like (fn (my-macro) ...), or even another `macwith` binding occurrence of the same macro name.

I don't prefer this to the other approach we're talking about, since after all it's within easy reach of the macro system to support local macros itself rather than with an error-prone code-walker like this.

However, `macwith` is a macro that makes sense in its own right. It's easy to work around many of the places the code walker runs into false positives, and if `macwith` came with support for an escape sequence, there would be easy workarounds in many other cases too.