Something has to be said for the uniformity of syntax. The lisp reader macro is used throughout the language; I have never used this syntax before (I prefer to

Something has to be said for the uniformity of syntax. The lisp reader macro is used throughout the language; I have never used this syntax before (I prefer to explicitly make objects, that way I know if the call succeeded right away) but grepped the PURI sources to see if it had a reader-macro, and sure enough it did. If there was no uniformity, I would have waited for a blog post to tell me something exists. You are complaining a Lisp URL needs to be quoted to distinguish it from other input tokens; how would you feel when you have more than one URL, say 10, on the screen and all of them are being echo'ed in a debug backtrace without visual aid or syntax highlighting? How about if you forget to delimit one with a space (oops, now you have a syntactically valid URL that's broken; the type checker wont help you verify URLs) Plus you can "merge" Lisp URLs, forming absolute URLs from a base URL and appending paths to it or building query parameters in an elegant fashion.