m4 is like that. Lots of templating languages are too. Code generation is useful and roughly what you end up with if the language isn't expressive enough, e.g. C or go. Is yours doing anything different to those?
What the lisp approach gives you is the macro has the parsed representation of the program available to inspect and manipulate. It doesn't have to expand to some fixed text, it can expand into different things based on the context of the call site.
Various languages have decided that syntactically distinguishing macros from functions is a good idea. Maybe the function is foo and a macro would be $foo. For what it's worth I think that's wrong-headed, and the proper fix is to have 'foo' represent some transform on its arguments, where it doesn't matter to the caller whether that is by macro or by function, but it's certainly popular.
What the lisp approach gives you is the macro has the parsed representation of the program available to inspect and manipulate. It doesn't have to expand to some fixed text, it can expand into different things based on the context of the call site.
Various languages have decided that syntactically distinguishing macros from functions is a good idea. Maybe the function is foo and a macro would be $foo. For what it's worth I think that's wrong-headed, and the proper fix is to have 'foo' represent some transform on its arguments, where it doesn't matter to the caller whether that is by macro or by function, but it's certainly popular.