[correnos]

The docs could do a better job of spelling it out, but csexp's really do only represent "trees of bytestrings". They're not a particularly rich format. If you're looking for "transfer this lambda over the network" semantics that's obviously a lot more complicated, but there's at least some research-project Schemes that've done it. The one I know of is Termite Scheme, which builds an Erlang-style distributed process model.

[nerdponx]

If that is indeed the case, then is it any better than an existing format like MessagePack?

[JonChesterfield]

I expect going digging would reveal that csexp is decades older than msgpack. As a format I agree it doesn't look great though.

May 1997 for csexp. https://web.archive.org/web/20230219084819/http://people.csa...

Msgpack less clear, maybe 2008. JSON is 2000ish.