> The mini-essay is about what syntactic sugar the language designer chooses to add to the language. Language features that let users extend the syntax are outs

> The mini-essay is about what syntactic sugar the language designer chooses to add to the language. Language features that let users extend the syntax are outside of the scope of that. What counts as part of the language? If you've coded in a lisp, you've used `and`, `or`, `cond`, `let*`, `letrec`, etc. All of those are defined by macros, but I don't think it's realistic to exclude them from being considered part of the language.