Yeah if you just ignore all the other control characters you had to add instead then you sure saved on parens. Bravo!

Yes! Exactly! Thank you; that was my whole point.

Your whole argument is basically treating parens as something different from other syntax characters, which is a nonsensical argument. If you’re going to compare syntax then you have to compare all the syntax you have.

I’m not trying to compare syntax in general. All I’m doing is refuting the original claim, which was that Lisp doesn’t use more parentheses than other (“conventional”) languages. It does.

All that stuff about syntactic noise, granted. I mean, I don’t agree personally, but it’s irrelevant to my point.