No, no, no, your getting me wrong!

It's *not* about function call overhead, it's about realising *macros* ¹, therefore helping to extend the syntax much better and reliable than codefilters ever can.

perl 6 also intends to insert macro-support.

But maybe you can show me a functional approach to solve this problem. : )

UPDATE: (¹) to make it clearer, a macro is executed and operates on the parameters given before returning the new code to be inserted.