Homoiconic means that the code structure is similar to the actual AST. In Lisps, this is easy to see, because a nested list of symbols is pretty much the defini

Homoiconic means that the code structure is similar to the actual AST. In Lisps, this is easy to see, because a nested list of symbols is pretty much the definition of an AST. In truth, real homoiconicity is hard to achieve in any language that doesn't represent code as trees/S-expressions. In Julia, they built a data structure that can represent code, and can be accessed via reflection, but it's no more homoiconic than most languages (note that "homoiconic" is nowhere on the page you linked to). In Lisps, the code is just nested lists, like other list data, and can be manipulated using the all of the standard list-processing functions. Whereas, if you look at the examples in Julia, you'll see that using macros vs functions involves special syntax all over the place. A good page for this is http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HomoiconicLanguages http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?HomoiconicLanguages