[gf000]

Well, then ad absurdum it would be easier to just output a bunch of 0s and 1s, right?

The same goes for "just a list of nested lists", sure it is easy to produce it, and for trivial examples it may actually be easy, but for more complex and realistic problems lack of "higher order" structure is a negative!

For something like JavaScript, you can just have a language-native AST object with a few helper functions and then can just call "addFunction" on it with proper arguments so that the API shape validates plenty of properties of your output.

[ijk]

Except you can express the higher order structure in s-expressions too, and using an AST usually means expressing it as a different syntax than the other parts of your program.

Or maybe I've just been sleeping on the power of Javascript AST.

[gf000]

So can you in binary!

And that's more of a library ergonomics question how nice it is. There are plenty of other languages with nice ASTs and `eval`, and that's the only ingredient you need.