You're quite right in that early C was a primitive compiler, and adding a macro processor was a cheap and easy way to add power.

Using the macro preprocessor to work around some fundamental issues with the language is not what I meant.

I meant devising one's own language using macros. The canonical example:

    #define BEGIN {
    #define END }

We laugh about that today, but the 80's people actually did that. Today's macros are often just more complicated attempts at the same thing.

The tales I hear about Lisp is that a team's code is not portable to another team, because they each invent their own macro language in order to be able to use Lisp at all.