Well, two things. Firstly, AST visitors in Python (or whatever) are clunky and lots of code to do what you say. Hell, I think that it's borderline unpythonic.

Well, two things. Firstly, AST visitors in Python (or whatever) are clunky and lots of code to do what you say. Hell, I think that it's borderline unpythonic. You have to consider lots of things, such as whether or not you can put an stmt where you're inserting code, and write a lot of, frankly ugly, Python code to do it. Hy macros (and really Lisp macros) that are first-class members of the language are nice, because they're a lot more clean to write. In addition, since Hy does some nasty stuff under the hood to generate clean Python AST, you can do stuff like: (print (if true true flase)) (Ok, that's a lie, since it'll do "print True if True else False", but if that had a (do) around everything, it'd still work by mangling the expression - just too tired to write that example right now :) ) Fundamentally, a Hy macro IS an AST macro, just on the parsed and tokenized Hy code (which turns into AST), rather then fiddling with Python AST (which isn't even a stable interface). That answer the question? :)