Lisp’s Syntax

Lisp uses one fundamental syntactic construct, the “symbolic expression” or S-expression.

Any “atom” such as a number or a symbol, is an S-expression.

Any parenthesized list of S-expressions, separated by whitespace, is an S-expression.

A functional form is a list of the form

(function-name arg1 arg2 ... argN)

This is sometimes called parenthesized prefix form.

(+ 3 5)

(* 2.5 (+ 2 2 7))

(sqrt x)

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