Yes, that was the discussion I was talking about, and I suppose you're correct; it wouldn't really help in most cases.
"As I said, to the best of my knowledge it's still an unsolved problem."
Then let's see if we can't solve it ;)
Personally, I think that the advantages in terseness of being able to use first class macros would probably outweigh the slight decrease in performance for edge cases.
Couldn't you use the current system, but if the car is a list, eval it, since you don't know what it is yet? That would only add a performance penalty for complex cars.
Maybe the complex car structures could start with a symbol that signifies that it returns a macro, and otherwise it isn't evaled and the performance penalty isn't incurred.
I.e. add a special form that transforms a function call into a macro call, such as (callmac fn). Then functions and macros could be the same, but you just call them differently. ssyntax could then be used to make it look nicer.
