Macros have traditionally been viewed as operations on syntax trees or
even on plain strings. This view makes macros seem ad hoc, and
is at odds with two desirable features of contemporary typed
functional languages: static typing and static scoping. At a deeper
level, there is a need for a simple, usable semantics for macros.
This paper argues that these problems can be addressed by formally
viewing macros as multi-stage computations. This view eliminates the
need for suspicious freshness conditions and tests on variable names,
and provides a compositional interpretation that can serve as a basis
for designing a sound type system for languages supporting macros, or
even for compilation.
To illustrate the proposed approach, we develop and present MacroML,
an extension of ML that supports inlining, recursive macros, and the
definition of new binding constructs. The latter is subtle, and is the
most novel addition in a statically typed setting. The semantics
of a core subset of MacroML is given by an interpretation into
MetaML, a statically-typed multi-stage programming language. It
is then easy to show that MacroML is stage- and type-safe: macro
expansion does not depend on run-time evaluation, and neither
``goes wrong'' in the usual sense.
