In the absolute abstract, you are correct. In the absolute abstract, you could replace parens with significant whitespace and have zero visible syntax. In prac

In the absolute abstract, you are correct. In the absolute abstract, you could replace parens with significant whitespace and have zero visible syntax. In practice, lisp adopted dotted lists 60 years ago and basically every lisp since has used it as one way to represent an associated list. Minimal syntax is better than zero syntax or loads of syntax.