I don't have much experience reading Lisp, but I think that some structures do stand out. The difference is that you look at the shape of code chunks rather tha

I don't have much experience reading Lisp, but I think that some structures do stand out. The difference is that you look at the shape of code chunks rather than special characters on a line. For example, LET blocks with lots of assignments stand out to me because of the chunk of pairs at the top. DO blocks look similar but the increment functions separate them. LOOP stands out for having a lot of symbols and not many parentheses. Aside from that, some lisps have tendencies (although not requirements) that symbols with common uses have special characters to stand out more. For example, foo for dynamic variables, +foo+ for globals, foo! for destructive operations (in scheme), foo? for predicates (scheme + clojure), and = for assignment (in arc). The choice of what to emphasize is different, but it was a conscious choice on the part of the language creators.