[bitwize]

The thing is in Lisp, data with a nice structure that you can easily work with is evaluatable as code; and all the code that runs has a nice structure and is easy to work with! You cannot easily manipulate and transform BASIC programs from within BASIC, and you cannot easily do anything in machine code.

But maybe this is part of what Gerald Sussman was talking about when he called Lisp a "low level language": like machine code, Lisp has the nice property that its default data representation is used for building directly executable programs.

[pjmlp]

Lisp shares with Forth a great feature, you only need to implement a few building blocks in Assembly, and then everything else can be built from them.

Too many get lost in the concept that using something like C is the only way to build languages.