> Do you just get used to this, or is it something that you have to keep struggling with? You get easily used to parenthesis and you start loving them, since t

> Do you just get used to this, or is it something that you have to keep struggling with? You get easily used to parenthesis and you start loving them, since the auto-indenting (on any good Lisp editor) can make you have very readable code. In fact, Common Lisp, having so much versatility in control flow operators (and, in general, a ton of handy helper functions), lets you write really readable code, and often that is the case. So highly readable, that the downside is that the common Common lisper (pun intended) feels no need to add comments in the code... As for your formula (setv result (- (/ (+ 1 3 88) 2) 8)) It can be written in a more readable way. As user "brudgers" wrote above: (- (/ (+ 1 3 88) 2) 8) ... and it gets more evident. As for "result", usually in Lisp you don't need to have such a variable since the last expression returned by a function automatically becomes the return value of the function.