You make an interesting and important point, but to be honest the article&#x27;s intended audience is people who are intimidated by language translation or just have never done it before. The &quot;Minilisp&quot; is not really a language so much as a tool to demonstrate the concepts of tokenizing, parsing and recursion. It is unfortunate if the result is a mischaracterization of real Lisp, but I was trying to cut a balance between being accurate and filling the article with tangential information.