A compiler is a translator, not a meta-programming system.

When it comes down to it, isn't "translating" and "meta-programming" the same thing? It's an honest question -- how do you make the distinction?

To add some context, I'm in the "interpreters all the way down" camp. On other words, it seems to me that hardware vs software is an arbitrary distinction. After all, someone had to decide how the hardware would respond to code, in other words, someone had to physically program the hardware to behave a certain way. In that sense, isn't the code we write (in lisp, C, C++, etc...) just a way to meta-program the hardware?

I'm not sure if that was very clear... Another way of saying it is that simply declaring "software should never modify software" or "software should never be treated as data" is an arbitrary and almost meaningless declaration.