The relationship between staged computation and procedural macros is often mentioned in the literature. However, this relationship is not as straightforward as it may appear. Existing approaches tend to compromise the role of macros as syntactic extensions, focusing primarily on staged type systems to enforce the static safety of macros.

In this position paper, we propose a different approach to connecting procedural macros and staged computation: to understand the semantic aspect of procedural macros through the lens of staged computation. We observe that the notion of a syntactic environment in hygienic macros has a natural counterpart in a staged extension of environment machines. Building on this observation, we sketch our draft design of an environment machine for a Lisp-like language with an explicit-renaming macro facility à la Clinger.

I am a Ph.D. student at Kyoto University, supervised by Atsushi Igarashi. I study multi-stage programming and modal lambda calculi.