How to generically wrap a function to be called in a loop with for a parametric sweep

Thanks Andrew,
I just noticed your reply.
Even though I have a working solution I think I will rewrite it to use the macro, it's much more elegant.

Just wondering about the apostrophes, could you briefly explain the use of the apostrophe before the let statement and inside the first argument of famCreateFamily ? is this related to the syntax of the macro definition ?
also, is the first argument of the foreach loop empty ?
I also find the mixing of commas and spaces to separate arguments confusing, do they serve the same purpose ?

ItsMichael said:

Just wondering about the apostrophes, could you briefly explain the use of the apostrophe before the let statement and inside the first argument of famCreateFamily ? is this related to the syntax of the macro definition ?
also, is the first argument of the foreach loop empty ?
I also find the mixing of commas and spaces to separate arguments confusing, do they serve the same purpose ?

The commas are not separators. There is an (undocumented) syntax in SKILL where commas can be used as an alternative separator to white space, but that's not what is going on here. What I'm using is the backquote operator (before the let) which is a macro that allows selective evaluation within a quoted list. If you use a normal quote (') rather than backquote (`) then everything inside the list is treated as unevaluated. If however you use backquote, then you can selectively evaluate things inside the list. The way it works is that anything preceded by a comma is evaluated, or if preceded by ,@ (not used in this case) then it's a list that is spliced in at that point.

Put simply, this is a convenient shorthand for building complex lists with lots of symbol in - for example - I can build:

`(a b (c d ,someVar) x y)

rather more concisely than:

liist('a 'b list('c 'd someVar) 'x 'y)

In the case of macros it's particularly convenient because the resulting code structure looks like the code I'm trying to generate. Another way of looking at this is that with the surrounding backquote, everywhere that there's a comma-something expression, then the evaluated value of something is stuffed into the resulting code structure. Macros don't evaluate their arguments before they are called, and instead return a list which is the code to use instead - so can programmatically transform a set of arguments into some code which is used instead.

The specific example I gave of using the macro ends up transforming into this code:

let(((_family famCreateFamily('start 'double))
    )
    foreach(start '(2e-08 4e-08 5e-08)
        famAddValue(_family start
            clip(VT("/OUTP") start 2e-07))
    )
    _family
)

Hope that helps!

Andrew