This summarizes and extends remarks made in the 1998 footnotes. It is important to keep the language incrementally extendable. Many extensions will add detail to messages so that less human intervention will be required.
Lisp notation is better.
Oh, well, the committees have decided otherwise. Anyway XML is isomorphic to the subset of Lisp data where the first item in a list is required to be atomic. Lisp data provides the additional generality that the first item of the list may itself be compound and have to be evaluated to determine how the rest of the list is to be interpreted. Many English adjectives are not used this way, and we propose only to use such proper adjectives. All expressions that may be taken apart should have the standard syntax at least as an alternative to special string syntaxes.