S-expression
Noun
Meaning
S-expression (plural S-expressions)
(computing) Abbreviation of symbolic expression.
Examples
An expression which evaluated to a piece of list structure would require that print traverse the list and print it out as an S-expression.
R5RS resolves this confusion by specifying three procedures that return environments, and providing a procedure eval that takes an s-expression and an environment and evaluates the expression in the environment provided.
Examples of data s-expressions Nested lists can be written as S-expressions: ((milk juice) (honey marmalade)) is a two-element S-expression whose elements are also two-element S-expressions.
Rivest's format defines an S-expression as being either an octet-string (a series of bytes ) or a finite list of other S-expressions.
If so, it then attempts to expand the macro, treating the items in the tail of the s-expression as arguments without compiling code to evaluate them, and this process is repeated recursively until no macro invocations remain.
There are several ways to represent the same list as an S-expression.