Metaprogramming is the writing of programs that write or manipulate other programs (or themselves) as their data or that do part of the work that is otherwise done at run time during compile time. In many cases, this allows programmers to get more done in the same amount of time as they would take to write all the code manually.
The language in which the metaprogram is written is called the metalanguage. The language of the programs that are manipulated is called the object-language. The capacity of a programming language to be its own meta-language is called reflexivity.
Not all metaprogramming involves generative programming. If programs are modifiable at runtime (as in Lisp, Python, Smalltalk, Ruby, PHP, Perl, Tcl and other languages), then techniques can be used to accomplish metaprogramming without actually generating source code.
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