What is Lisp syntax, really, and the use-mention distinction

Roly Perera said... This sounds reasonable. Lisp's obsession with representing everything as lists has never made much sense to me, whereas the idea of being able to reify an arbitrary meta-value into a value of the corresponding object-level datatype makes a lot of sense. Your point seems to be that there is no reason for that datatype to be "List". Sure, you can encode environments as lists, but