We all know the pattern to make a recursive macro. It requires putting the definition inside another macro and invoking that auxiliary outer macro before recursion may happen.

There’s already some kind of a stack of macro definitions inside FASM’s preprocessor, and in case of recursive macros the reason to redefine them is to make them work the same no matter how nested the recursion is. Basically the redefinition is logically equivalent to pushing a copy of the top of the macro definition stack to that same stack.

Then I thought having a directive to perform exactly that (doubling top of the stack) would let us avoid filling preprocessor namespace with auxiliary wrappers and make code cleaner. Something along the lines of:
Possible directive name and syntax are subject to discussion. I can see two possible reasons not to have such a shortcut: the need to reserve yet another keyword and the existence of the well-known workaround solution. Are there any other reasons?

P.S. Even bigger question to discuss is about having a special kind of macro that is explicitly recursive and doesn’t fallback to its previous redefinition when invoked. That would simplify the case of mutual recursion: instead of wrapping every macro that could possibly create such a recursion they would all have been marked as recursive thus saving some typing and source code nesting level.

This is how fasmg handles it (with ":" modifier). It might be possible to implement a similar modifier in fasm 1.

That could be great. Maybe.

I just started thinking about whether recursiveness is a property of a macro or its invocation. While lots of macros are either recursive or non-recursive, I can imagine some macro (maybe a proc implementation that would support Pascal-like nested procedures, something like that) which would probably need to switch between recursive and non-recursive behaviour.

OTOH, since the recursive macro would just be a convenience syntax sugar feature (possibly saving some memory and/or time), it wouldn’t really break the classic behaviour for non-recursive macros (the default case).