Pisin Bootvong <joesb.coe9@gmail.com> wrote:
+---------------
| You feed data to web server, and it returns a web page. In a sense,
| Apache substitute URL for an HTML page.
| 
| An SQL server just substitute SQL query with the result on query.
| 
| All of the above is valid by your definition of "substitution"; You
| don't care how complex it has to go through before the output is
| derived, just that an input is used to derived the output.
| 
| With all implication above, I could have said that C++ macro is like
| SQL Server or Apache, just a token substitution system with some minor
| different :-)
+---------------

Except that -- unlike C/C++ macros -- Lisp macros can easily, during
the process of expansion, do such things as query HTTP web servers and/or
SQL databases and incorporate the results into the macro expansion!!
Try *that* with other languages' macros...  ;-}  ;-}


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock			<rpw3@rpw3.org>
627 26th Avenue			<URL:http://rpw3.org/>
San Mateo, CA 94403		(650)572-2607