GNU Emacs Lisp Reference Manual

12.1: A Simple Example of a Macro

Suppose we would like to define a Lisp construct to increment a variable value, much like the ++ operator in C. We would like to write (inc x) and have the effect of (setq x (1+ x)). Here's a macro definition that does the job:

(defmacro inc (var)
   (list 'setq var (list '1+ var)))

When this is called with (inc x), the argument var has the value x---not the value of x. The body of the macro uses this to construct the expansion, which is (setq x (1+ x)). Once the macro definition returns this expansion, Lisp proceeds to evaluate it, thus incrementing x.