Thanks a lot! I suppose I was getting caught up in a limited definition of metaprogramming, as essentially every Ruby example I've gotten is "we moved a parameter to the method name".

The LISP macros make me jealous. What non-LISP-like languages have macros? Nemerle does and looks fairly neat. It'd seem like somehow passing the AST to user-defined modules would get ya pretty far, but there must be a ton of complications, otherwise more languages would offer it.

I suppose we can consider converting quoted code to another target (like GPU, or database) as metaprogramming. I guess I had filed that under "just reflection".