[vog]

If you say "S-expressions" instead of "LISP", this is perfectly true! The syntax of S-expressions was only meant to be used for LISP data structures, while programming was meant to happen in another syntax called "M-expressions" [1], which was to be converted to S-expressions by the compiler. However, the programmers liked to use S-expressions directly, so M-expressions were never actually implemented.

In that sense, the LISP syntax (S-expressions) were ideed designed as an intermediate language, not to be used by programmers directly (except for plain data structures).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-expression

[crntaylor]

This is really interesting - I didn't know about that snippet of Lisp history. So the expression we'd write today as

  (car
    (append
      '(a b c)
      '(d e f)))

Would originally have been written in M-expression form as

  car[append[(a b c); (d e f)]]

Programming in Lisp might be a very different experience if M-expressions had caught on!

[Anon84]

It would be called programming in Mathematica ;)