[kazinator]

The dialects you mentioned have a list-based syntax. They are list based in the same way that C++ is token based. (Actually I believe this is not strictly true of Scheme, which is defined from the character level up by a grammar, like many other programming languages. Bootstrapping compilers for Scheme have been written that do not read the program as a nested list. Those features of Scheme that calculate list structure have to do that at run time, of course, like quotation and quasi-quotation, but that doesn't require their syntax to be treated as a list during compilation).

You say you're not talking about a random toy Lisp someone threw together. Yet those kind of projects are the ones that have lists as the core or perhaps the only data abstraction for the entire language. If we search for the Lisps that make your remarks correct, that's mainly what we find.

I think this is a rare exception in production Lisps. One notable one is something called Pico Lisp. People take this seriously and use it, so we can't call it a toy. Yet it does almost everything with lists.

When people say Lisp nowadays no you cannot guess that it's Scheme or Common Lisp. It could be Clojure, or Fennel or others.

Scheme and Common Lisp are very different languages.