[PMunch]

Not a Lisp user, but a heavy Nim macro user. Nim macros are AST based, which means that after the parser part of the compiler have read the code and created a tree structure of it your macro is called on this tree. Then you can modify this tree to your hearts desire and return a new tree that the Nim compiler will splice back into the main tree before continuing. This means that you rewrite pretty much anything into pretty much anything else. You also have access to reading files on the machine, or doing pretty much anything else that Nim offers. For examples of what you can do with it you can have a look at my macro to create GUIs: https://peterme.net/cross-platform-guis-and-nim-macros.html, my article on how I use macros to create more read- and maintainable code: https://peterme.net/metaprogramming-and-read-and-maintainabi... or perhaps see how Protobuf was written as a string parsing macro which reads a Protobuf specification and spits out all the types and procedures you need to use it: https://github.com/PMunch/protobuf-nim

[lispm]

> which means that after the parser part of the compiler

Lisp works slightly different. The macro form is an expression (a list) with the macro operator as the first element. The next elements in the expression can be anything as data.