It Seemed Like A Good Idea, At The Time

Recently, I found myself needing to deal with a “convenience” macro, which quoted several of its arguments for me before passing them along to the real function.  Unfortunately, only the macro was exported from the library, and I was unable to access the base function.

(define-syntax convenient-function
  (syntax-rules ()
    ((_ arg1 arg2) (much-harder-function 'arg1 'arg2))))

How useful.  To save me a handful of quotes, I lose the ability to programmatically generate my arguments.

As I was loath to reimplement the entire library just to regain that ability, I looked for another solution.  Thankfully, I found one.

(define (much-harder-function arg1 arg2)
  (eval `(convenient-function ,arg1 ,arg2)
        (environment '(convenient-lib))))

As far as I can tell, this circumvents the macro’s quoting features entirely to allow me to pass in a dynamically generated symbol.  While it won’t work with functions which modify the environment, it worked well in my case, and allowed me to move on to more interesting code.