In some languages, like C, you don't have the full power of main language inside the macros.
In other languages, you have the whole language inside the macros, but the community and the docs discourage you about writing macros. As a related example, in rust the macros have a ! so it's easy to distinguish macros from function calls.
In the lisp family of languages, the idea is that everyone can write macros. Macros are dangerous because they can do weird things, but functions can do weird things too. Functions are more restricted, but until you look at the source code you are not sure that they will not ignore all the arguments, or format your hard disk, or something weird in between.
I know more about the internal working of racket. One of the open secrets is that it has a lot of macros that pretend to be function. They behave nicely like function, but under the hood they are macros, mostly to generate more efficient code in the common case. For example functions with keywords, of functions with contracts, or functions like `in-list` that can be used in a `for` to iterate a list. (Other macros are weird and do very complex things, in particular `for` and `match` are implemented as macros inside the language.)
In other languages, you have the whole language inside the macros, but the community and the docs discourage you about writing macros. As a related example, in rust the macros have a ! so it's easy to distinguish macros from function calls.
In the lisp family of languages, the idea is that everyone can write macros. Macros are dangerous because they can do weird things, but functions can do weird things too. Functions are more restricted, but until you look at the source code you are not sure that they will not ignore all the arguments, or format your hard disk, or something weird in between.
I know more about the internal working of racket. One of the open secrets is that it has a lot of macros that pretend to be function. They behave nicely like function, but under the hood they are macros, mostly to generate more efficient code in the common case. For example functions with keywords, of functions with contracts, or functions like `in-list` that can be used in a `for` to iterate a list. (Other macros are weird and do very complex things, in particular `for` and `match` are implemented as macros inside the language.)