Land of Lisp

The Building Blocks of Lisp Syntax

From the crazy line of C++ code in the previous section, you can get the idea that C++ has a lot of weird syntax—for indicating namespaces, dereferencing pointers, performing casts, referencing member functions, performing Boolean operations, and so on.

If you were to write a C++ compiler, you would need to do a lot of hard work so that the compiler could read this code and obey the many C++ syntax rules, before you could make any sense of the code.

Writing a Lisp compiler or interpreter is much easier. The part of a Lisp compiler or interpreter that reads in the code (which Lispers actually call the reader) is simpler than in C++ or any other major programming language. Take a random piece of Lisp code:

(defun ...