13.6.1 Wrong Time

The most common problem in writing macros is doing too some of the real work prematurely--while expanding the macro, rather than in the expansion itself. For instance, one real package had this nmacro definition:

(defmacro my-set-buffer-multibyte (arg) (if (fboundp 'set-buffer-multibyte) (set-buffer-multibyte arg)))

With this erroneous macro definition, the program worked fine when interpreted but failed when compiled. This macro definition called set-buffer-multibyte during compilation, which was wrong, and then did nothing when the compiled package was run. The definition that the programmer really wanted was this:

(defmacro my-set-buffer-multibyte (arg) (if (fboundp 'set-buffer-multibyte) `(set-buffer-multibyte ,arg)))

This macro expands, if appropriate, into a call to set-buffer-multibyte that will be executed when the compiled program is actually run.