The Symmetry Between Code and Data in Lisp
You have seen that Lisp has very elegant and symmetrical facilities for translating raw string data from the outside world and converting it to and from Lisp syntax expressions. But Lisp has an even deeper symmetry. It can treat program code and data interchangeably. A programming language that uses the same data structures to store data and program code is called homoiconic.
You saw an example of homoiconicity in Chapter 3, when we discussed code mode and data mode. In that example, we used the quote to change between the two modes:
> '(+ 1 2);data mode (+ 1 2)> (+ 1 2);code mode 3
In the previous chapter, we took this concept one step further by using a quasiquote when defining the describe-path function. ...
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