I’m afraid I can’t agree with you there. Lisp’s macro syntax looks fine to me. It is certainly a heck of a lot more beautiful than the (turing complete) C++ template system and somewhat debuggable too. Having said that, I don’t find perl ugly either.

Maybe the reason you don’t like is that you’re not sufficiently familiar with it. What would you prefer it to look like (maybe you could macroize a new macro system!)

From the description of what you were trying to do, it sounds like you were trying to do something that required runtime information – what a variable was set to, when macros operate at compile time. If you need to extract the symbol value, you need to expand to something like `(symbol-value ,variable).

Whenever I play around with elisp macros I can get them to do about half of what I want, and then I give up on them for another six months (my last problem, if I remember right, was I couldn’t figure out how to get a macro to use a symbol passed inside a variable).