[jdw64]

> it should be in those point cuts, or maybe not all of them.

I really enjoy hearing these kinds of war stories from senior programmers. I don't have a LISP background, but having learned Haskell, your point resonates perfectly.

In the Haskell mindset, letting string-matching rules alter the actual semantics of a program is fundamentally wrong. (At least, that's how I'm interpreting your LISP analogy since I don't know the LISP side well.)

I completely agree with you. Changing the meaning of logic based on string patterns is definitely an anti-pattern. (Though, to be brutally honest, when deadlines are incredibly tight, I've definitely caught myself mindlessly doing it too.)