> Yeah, sure. S-expresssions are literals in Lisp, and can be "parsed" calling eval. No on both counts. (1) S-expressions aren't literals. (2) s-expressions

> Yeah, sure. S-expresssions are literals in Lisp, and can be "parsed" calling eval. No on both counts. (1) S-expressions aren't literals. (2) s-expressions are not "parsed" by calling lisp eval. Lisp eval's argument is an s-expression - it doesn't parse anything. (It also doesn't read anything.) Lisp read turns character sequences into s-expressions. > But JSON wins over s-expressions too, because s-expressions are too simple. How do you represent John Smith as an s-expression? If you'd like, exactly the same way you'd represent it in JSON, because lisp's read handles a superset of the JSON datatypes. > software that consumes s-expressions has to know how to interpret their structure As does JSON. Take your example John Smith. What JSON datatype do you expect to get? (JSON just has numbers, strings, arrays, booleans, and hashes, where the keys have a restricted format.)