Lisp macros are nice, but as Gumby said above [0] a common approach is to use Lisp's quoting abilities to construct a data structure that represents the problem

Lisp macros are nice, but as Gumby said above [0] a common approach is to use Lisp's quoting abilities to construct a data structure that represents the problem at hand (in its own terms) and then create functions to parse / manipulate that data structure. A classic example comes from Peter Norvig's "Principles of Artificial Intelligence" wherein he defines a subset of English grammar as a data structure [1]: '((sentence -> (noun-phrase verb-phrase)) (noun-phrase -> (Article Noun)) (verb-phrase -> (Verb noun-phrase)) (Article -> the a) (Noun -> man ball woman table) (Verb -> hit took saw liked))) He then goes on to define a function "generate" that uses the above to create simplistic English sentences. Additional rules can be added by a non-programmar so long as they understand how their domain logic has been mapped to Lisp. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705558 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705558 [1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter2.md#21-a-grammar-for-a-subset-of-english https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter2....