[6ren]

That's your DOM idea; I'd argue it's not homoiconic, because it's too indirect. But I wouldn't argue very strenuously as I don't know the actual definition of homoiconic. :-)

You're right that the AST is available only for passed text; I hadn't thought of that as a limitation, but you're right. I was thinking of macros, that you define and manipulate within a program: the limitation doesn't affect this use case. Doing it this way, you also get control of {read,compile,run}-time.

I think it's fair to say there are degrees of homoiconicity; you can get some of the benefits by having just a subset of the features. I conject that "a language with full homoiconicity" is identical with "a lisp" - but it doesn't really matter, if we're interested in benefits.