Totally agree with you on how difficult this is to read. Author is speaking some form of high academic CS (and it isn't obviously used correctly). "Common Lisp

Totally agree with you on how difficult this is to read. Author is speaking some form of high academic CS (and it isn't obviously used correctly). "Common Lisp augments the interpreter with other automata on the same substrate which make construction straightforwards. Though the choice of automata may vary, the essential idea of reifying the act of construction is universal." Here he is basically saying that you've turned the elements of program construction into a data-structure (the s-expression). I believe automata just refers to any program in this context. (Think computability + complexity; languages executable by a computer can be described in terms of different types of automata... NFA, DFA, PDA etc). So you are making program construction into a data-structure which can be used to manipulate programs construction, or can be manipulated itself. I agree with you about the mumbo-jumbo.