I should have said a read and macroexpanded lisp source has a 1-1 relationship with the AST. As an aside, the bigger distinction between something like C++ tem

I should have said a read and macroexpanded lisp source has a 1-1 relationship with the AST. As an aside, the bigger distinction between something like C++ template metaprogramming and Lisp metaprogramming is that while C++ uses a template language completely orthogonal to the runtime language, Lisp macros is nothing more than Lisp code executed at macroexpand-time rather than eval-time.