As alluded to by Steve Yegge in a blog post in 2005 (http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-ema

As alluded to by Steve Yegge in a blog post in 2005 (http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem http://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/the-emacs-problem), if you are using a Lisp, storing data as sexp means that you can define the appropriate functions, and "execute" the data to transform it however you like.