[dmux]

Lisp macros are nice, but as Gumby said above [0] a common approach is to use Lisp's quoting abilities to construct a data structure that represents the problem at hand (in its own terms) and then create functions to parse / manipulate that data structure.

A classic example comes from Peter Norvig's "Principles of Artificial Intelligence" wherein he defines a subset of English grammar as a data structure [1]:

  '((sentence -> (noun-phrase verb-phrase))
    (noun-phrase -> (Article Noun))
    (verb-phrase -> (Verb noun-phrase))
    (Article -> the a)
    (Noun -> man ball woman table)
    (Verb -> hit took saw liked)))

He then goes on to define a function "generate" that uses the above to create simplistic English sentences.

Additional rules can be added by a non-programmar so long as they understand how their domain logic has been mapped to Lisp.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33705558

[1] https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/docs/chapter2....