If you want to see a Lisp desiged for practicality (other than CL, which definitely was, make no mistake), Kaz Kylheku (who goes by kazinator around here)'s TXR

If you want to see a Lisp desiged for practicality (other than CL, which definitely was, make no mistake), Kaz Kylheku (who goes by kazinator around here)'s TXR is a neat thing. It's a combination of Lisp and a pattern matching language, desiged for data-munging tasks similar to those done by AWK and Perl. But it's actually better than AWK (I won't go so far as to say it's better than Perl: it is, however, more regular than Perl, which is a nice thing), because the pattern matching language was designed with multiline records in mind, and is a lot more readable than a long regex, IMHO. And the built-in lisp was deliberately optimized for succinctness, something many lisps don't do well. You can find some examples at http://www.nongnu.org/txr/ http://www.nongnu.org/txr/. And if that's not practical, I don't know what is.