[drob518]

S-expressions are just lists and trees. That’s it. If a language has groups of words and any hierarchy, you can use s-expressions to represent it. Sure, some human languages might be more or less flat and the groups might represent different things, but I don’t see how that prevents s-expressions from being suitable. Greek doesn’t rely on word order nearly as much as English (it does more with suffixes to indicate subject and object, for instance), but all of that can still be represented in s-expressions.

[twoodfin]

Sure, no argument that s-expressions are wonderfully simple & expressive.

But most human languages—or at least the dominant ones that compose the vast bulk of the LLM training set—use more complex structuring rules for whatever evolutionary linguistic reasons. Easier error correction? Auditory disambiguation?

You could tell similar “just so” stories about computer language syntax, & why s-expressions didn’t win out over (say) XML-style tagging. And it turns out pseudo-XML is a great way to talk to LLMs.

EDIT: To be clear, by “s-expressions” I mean their typical use in Lisp programming of a function expression followed by a series of parameter expressions. The “grammar” is just eval/apply.