It turned out, that the above solution doesn't work exactly as expected -- since the scopes of "private" and "interface" get separated (by the with-syntax form that I have been so proud of), it is impossible for the public forms to refer to private bindings.
To solve that issue, I had to pass the private bindings to the function passed with-syntax and then retrieve them. For some reason (which is unclear to me) I had to convert them to datum and then back to syntax, because if they were given verbatim, they failed to get renamed properly. I'd appreciate if anyone could explain it to me, or reviewed the code below to tell whether the names and comments aren't misleading (e.g. I used the name "lexical-context" for a variable, but I'm not sure whether the entity that it refers to can properly be called "lexical context") (define-syntax private+public (lambda (stx) (define (interface+name+body specs lexical-context) ;; the second argument is the lexical context that we ;; want to preserve while extracting the specs (define (interface-name interface) (match interface ((head . tail) (interface-name head)) ((? symbol? name) name))) `(,(datum->syntax stx (syntax->datum lexical-context)) ;; for some reason we need to deconstruct and reconstruct ;; lexical-context here ,(map (lambda(spec) (syntax-case spec () ((interface . body) (datum->syntax stx `(,(syntax->datum #'interface) ,(interface-name (syntax->datum #'interface)) ,(syntax->datum #'body)))))) specs))) (syntax-case stx () ((_ (private ...) ((pub-define . pub-spec) ...)) ;; we pass the private definitions to the interface+name+body, ;; because we want to be able to refer to private definitions ;; from within the public ones (otherwise the macro processor ;; would treat them as if they were within separate contexts) (with-syntax ((((private ...) ((interface name body) ...)) (interface+name+body #'(pub-spec ...) #'(private ...)))) #'(begin (define name (and (defined? 'name) name)) ... (let () private ... (set! name (let () (pub-define interface . body) name)) ...)))))))