Overall I agree: yes, with fexprs you lose some code introspection ability compared to macros. I haven't found it to be a big deal in my fexpr-based hobby Lisp

Overall I agree: yes, with fexprs you lose some code introspection ability compared to macros. I haven't found it to be a big deal in my fexpr-based hobby Lisp so far. Re your two points: You could have "symbol fexprs", analogous to symbol macros, I guess. For places I think the first-class solution as employed by T and others is better, and would work fine with fexprs: (set (name-of person-1) "sam") simply stands for ((setter name-of) person-1 "sam"). IOW, name-of is expected to be a reader function. Every reader function has a writer function attached to it, that we extract with (setter name-of). Then we call that writer function with the rest of the original arguments.