I hope you don't mind me having dug this thread up, with an idea that is only loosely related with the original one.
Recently I've been doing a small project in Clojure, and I've found that it provides a function called "partial" that performs a sort of partial application. With guile's curried definitions, it can be defined as (define ((partial function . args) . args+) (apply function `(,@args ,@args+))) and it works rather nicely: (map (partial cons 2) '((3 4) (3 5) (4 6) (7 1))) ===> ((2 3 4) (2 3 5) (2 4 6) (2 7 1)) I believe that -- since it is just a function -- it is much less controversial than both the short macros and SRFI-26 (although its range of applicability is narrower), and it seems to compose well with the spirit of Scheme, so maybe that would be a nice-have?