[ux266478]

I'm very familiar with Lisp, you don't have to explain it to me. I think you are mistaken as to the meaning of what is meant by "procedural language" here. It's simply the mode of computation where a program is directly conceived as a hierarchical sequence of steps. I think you got caught up in the idea of a grand disjunction of "expressions" and "statements", with a distinguishing feature involving return values, and so on. But no, that's not particularly relevant here (nor is it universally true, or applicable)

To simplify it, you can consider cons, car, cdr the beating heart of Lisp. These special forms directly encode the execution semantics as the traversal of a head over cells of a tape. Lisp belongs to the same family as the Turing machine, and that's a very big family. SML also belongs to this family. The overwhelming majority of programming languages belong to this family.