Question

I am new to macros. I am trying to write a macro to generate some functions:

(defmacro test (name)
  `(defun ,(intern (concat "fun-" (symbol-name name))) ()
     ...))

I want to pass a symbol to this macro like (test 'stuff), but emacs gives me this error:

Debugger entered--Lisp error: (wrong-type-argument symbolp (quote stuff))

Is that telling me (quote staff) is not the right argument to symbol-name ? How can I fix this ?

Answer 1

This all seems OK. The only thing is that you should call your macro with an unquoted symbol, like this:

(test stuff)

The reason for this is that, as noted in the Emacs Lisp Manual :

Macros […] operate on the unevaluated expressions for the arguments, not on the argument values as functions do.

When you pass symbols to functions, you are used to quote them to prevent them being considered as a variable name and evaluated to the associated value. However, macro arguments are not evaluated during the macro expansion, but afterwards, when the expansion itself gets evaluated.