[paultag]

It's not meaningless, a lot of people (myself included) use it to talk about programs that can alter their own program in the data structures that they're good at moving around.

In Python, the AST approximates this. Perhaps I'm lax in usage, but I think there's a continuum of homoiconicity - some things (like C) have no language functionality to deal with their own source code. Other languages (like CL) are very good at this, since you write the language in it's own data structures. Other languages (like Python, or Racket) aren't homoiconic, but they approximate what makes homoiconicity special.

[59nadir]

Are you saying this approximation makes for less powerful macros? If you are, I find that to be ridiculous, as Racket's macro system is way beyond other Lisps' macro systems.

The syntax objects hold more information about scopes, namespaces and the like than they would were they just datum(s?).