homoiconicity

Practical example of Lisp's flexibility?

Someone is trying to sell Lisp to me, as a super powerful language that can do everything ever, and then some. Can anyone provide a practical code example of Lisp's power?(Preferably alongside equivalent logic coded in a regular language.) ...

What makes lisp macros so special

Reading Paul Graham's essays on programming languages one would think that Lisp macros are the only way to go. As a busy developer working on other platforms I have not had the privledge of using lisp macros. As someone who wants to understand the buzz please explain what make's this feature so powerful. Please also relate this to somet...

Where do I get more information on Homoiconicity?

I have been experimenting with functional programming and I still dont understand the concept. Do you guys know any good books or tutorials or examples that discuss this concept? Or if you could show small snippets about its usage, that would be great. ...

Can a compiled language be homoiconic?

By definition the word homoiconic means: Same representation of code and data In LISP this means that you could have a quoted list and evaluate it, so (car list) would be the function and (cdr list) the arguments. This can either happen at compile- or at run-time, however it requires an interpreter. Is it possible that compiled l...

Traversing Scheme function as a list

Isn't it possible to treat functions in Scheme as any other list? Basically, what I want do to is something like this: (define (foo) "hello") (cdr foo) ; or similar, should return the list ((foo) "hello") I've found a similar discussion about this, and I feel a bit disappointed if this is not possible with Scheme. If so, why is th...