The idea of anaphoric macros[1] is first found in Paul Graham's "On Lisp"[2] and is based on the linguistic concept of anaphora, an expression whose meaning depends on the meaning of another expression in its context. An anaphor (like "it") is such a referring term.

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphoric_macro [2] http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisp.html