Re: Problem with ((FIRST) ...)

[RMS at MIT-AI (Richard M. Stallman)]

On the Lisp machine, FIRST is already a macro,
one designed to expand into an expression.
So if expression macros were recognized in the
car of a function, ((FIRST)...) would barf because
FIRST has no argument.  If you gave it one, as ((FIRST FOO) ...)
it would expand into ((CAR FOO) ...) which isn't what you want.

This is no problem for just defining the ((FIRST) ...) macro
since you could pick some other name for it.  But I think
it shows that it would be a feature to make function macros
completely distinct from the existing expression macros.