4 ms·
"What makes Lisp’s syntax powerful is not the fact that it can be represented as a data structure, it’s that it’s possible to read it without </em>parsing</em>.
by k__ 6y ago
"What makes Lisp’s syntax powerful is not the fact that it can be represented as a data structure, it’s that it’s possible to read it without </em>parsing</em>."
For me that always was exactly was homoiconicity was all about.
- rscho 6y agoHomoiconicity is a start. But the killer feature is simplicity. In Lisp, only symbols and parentheses. In prolog, only predicate head, body and atoms. This is what makes those two languages so suitable to syntactic macros, while other languages claiming homoiconicity with more syntactic irregularity make syntactic macros impractical (although certainly possible). IMO, semantic AST-level macros are certainly a better choice in non homoiconic and syntactically irregular languages.