> It has structure which is the same thing as saying it has 'shape'. Not really. Shape is a distinct visual quality. > Similarly the syntactic structure of Li

> It has structure which is the same thing as saying it has 'shape'. Not really. Shape is a distinct visual quality. > Similarly the syntactic structure of Lisp source-code let's us see the structure of the program that is generated by that source-code. I find that questionable. > It is iconic. It is iconic to the thing it represents, the program, which in a sense is the same thing, just a different, but structurally isomorphic representation of the program itself. It is homoiconic. No, 'iconic' is concerned with different things. > but structurally isomorphic representation of the program itself That has very little to do iconic representation. Seeing textual source code as an iconic representation of the machine representation is stretching the concept beyond its intended meaning (about shape, form, graphical representation, ...).