Thanks. We've considered doing other things — like function call syntax for macros (which is essentially what Lisp/Scheme have), but decided against it. It just causes confusion. Can you pass a macro around like you can a function? Can functions shadow macros and vice versa? What happens if a macro introduces a local variable that shadows the macro itself? Basically it comes down to fact that macros are syntactic and as such behave very differently from functions, which are not syntactic. With the @ syntax, there's no confusion.