Common Lisp macro facility is far more than a preprocessor. It allows manipulation of the language AST using the full language and the mechanic is perfectly ingrained into it.

That allows the programmer to create new abstractions, domain specific languages, or to add support for new programming paradigms (as for instance, logic programming or as suggested by LanX, alternative OO systems).

> It allows manipulation of the language AST using the full language and the mechanic is perfectly ingrained into it.

perlcompile lists perlcompile listed so many backends to analyze the op-tree.

It's unfortunate that there is no mechanism to preserve the original code-snippets in these tree nodes.

FWIW one can (ab)use use as a macro mechanism, you might be interested in my talk about Fun with Macros

Cheers Rolf
_{(addicted to the Perl Programming Language :)
Wikisyntax for the Monastery}

The preprocessor struggles to parse the code.

The only thing you can statically parse in Perl is POD.°

But the lisp macro gets the code (or rather AST) for free. No confusion where it begins or ends and about the elements in between.

When OOP became popular, various lisp dialects just added some macros for implemention. Backwards compatibility included.

°) well as POD, you can't make it to code. Mind you:

POD inside a here doc is both string code and extractable comment.