[brudgers]

Historically, Common Lisp's preference for symbols over strings to represent text is due to the nature of equality comparisons. Symbols are equal based on their pointers. Strings are equal based on their byte sequences. Clojure leverages Java's immutable strings to allow pointer comparisons.

I apologize for not being clearer. The point I was trying to make is that Lisp programs often used lists in a data centric manner and my example based on the 1978 paper was optimistically intended to illustrate that.

Perhaps there's an analogy between lists in traditional Lisp programming and text in *nix systems in so far as each is used as a standard interface when composing systems from sub-systems. Or perhaps not.