Lisp is the goal, C is the path

Lisp is the goal, C is the path

>>10

Most programming languages were more portable than C.

Not if you're talking about ANSI C. Earlier programming languages were poorly standardized if at all, and even if standardized implementations existed across platforms, they still didn't support as many platforms as C. There was such a notion as ``Standard FORTRAN", but FORTRAN was only intended to run on proper computers, not any random device with Turing-complete logic circuits (what today are referred to as ``embedded systems"). It also wasn't really adequate as a systems programming language because it lacked pointers. Some considered Pascal an acceptable alternative to C, however it too lacked pointers and was poorly standardized.

>>11

Scheme which is internally a C-based VM is less homoiconic than Scheme expressed in form of Scheme functions.

Uh, no? Homoiconicity has to do with code and data being interchangeable, it has nothing to do with how the interpreter/compiler is implemented. That's like saying Lisp is insufficiently homoiconic because the processor it runs on was designed using VHDL instead of s-expressions.