Comment by jerf

"Sure, the pile of Lisp macros that recapitulates most of Haskell would be gnarly and nasty."

I don't think you can macro your way to Haskell. Haskell wants a guarantee that if some function takes a function of type Int -> Int, the passed-in function will absolutely positively not do anything in the universe except take an int and return an int, and if that isn't true and that closure can do something else, Haskell breaks. Even if you can macro your way towards restricting arbitrary closures like that, you don't have Lisp anymore; you've got Haskell. Or you don't have Haskell and you do have Lisp. The two are fundamentally opposed at a deep philosophical level.