In Lisp, code is data. What benefit does that provide?

Question

In Lisp, any program\'s code is actually a valid data structure. For example, this adds one and two together, but it\'s also a list of three items.

(+ 1 2)
<         


        

Answer 1

My favorite example... In college some friends of mine were writing a compiler in Lisp. So all their data structures including the parse tree was lisp s-expressions. When it was time to implement their code generation phase, they simply executed their parse tree.