Should clarify something (follow-up to previous reply, see below or above).
Most macros don't want to deal with whitespace and comments. We also might want to _not let_ them, otherwise people will start using comments as code, like in Ruby. Macros just want expressions. So, we would define a second level of the AST and perform a second pass.
For the same base notation, there may be multiple languages defined in terms of it. If such a language has any form of prefix or infix, or uses the `outside_parens()` calling convention, the second pass would have to group nodes into expressions, in ways specific to that language. Furthermore, it should be addled with metadata about packages, types, and so on. The resulting AST is compiled, fed to macros, etc.
