In reply to Bartosz Jabłoński.

Thank you, Bart, for following it through. You offered a great solution for removing the brackets as a problem on its own. However, for the purpose of passing comma-separated value as a macro parameter, I would rather not create that bracket problem in the first place (even though it's very tempting and beautiful), and just use either %str(a, b, c) if a, b and c are resolved values, or %quote(&varlist) where %let varlist = a, b, c;

But as long as you come up with that "bracket way" of passing in parameters I do admire your persistence and appreciate your input and the solution.

Best regards,
Leonid