In GNU Emacs 24.3.1 (i686-suse-linux-gnu, GTK+ Version 3.8.1) of 2013-04-27 Windowing system distributor `The X.Org Foundation', version 11.0.11302000 System Description: openSUSE 12.3/Tumbleweed (i586) The following test case demonstrates a problem that has been distilled from Org's test suite. Org has since switched to use defun instead of defmacro to work around this issue, but it seems that this might be a corner case that eager macro expansion produces or not yet warn about (whatever the intended behaviour might be).