Hello all,

Currently, eval macros need to quote their arguments:

#+macro: identity (eval "$1")

This means:
1. Users need to remember to put quotes around $n all the time
2. It’s impossible to pass arguments with a " character to a macro

The attached patch changes the behavior of eval macro arguments so that
$1 etc. expand to the argument with quotation marks.  That is, the
following is now the correct way to write a macro (note lack of "s):

#+macro: identity (eval $1)

This solves the above problems but:
1. breaks backwards compatibility of eval macros, since the with-quotes
   version is now incorrect
2. disables macros like the following, where the macro arguments are
   interpreted as lisp symbols:

#+macro: funcall2 (eval ($1 $2 $3))

{{{funcall2(setq,org-export-with-date,nil)}}}

For 1, I can add a check for "$n" constructs (including quotes) to
org-lint and/or org-macro, to detect the backwards compatibility error.
I believe that macros like in 2 are rather perverse: macro arguments
are most similar to strings, not symbols or arbitrary pieces of lisp.
(For arbitrary lisp evaluation, there’s babel.)  Nonetheless, such
macros can be recreated explicitly in the new system using eval+read
and string interpolation:

#+macro: funcall2 (eval (eval (read (format "(%s %s %s)" $1 $2 $3))))

Thoughts?

Thanks,

-- 
Aaron Ecay