I relish comments like these from Lisp fans that actually KNOW Lisp.
Someday we'll resurrect it all...
Reader macros blew my mind when I first read about them. Being able to change the very laws of the universe from within my simple little programs... Insane!
In Lisp you actually don't write parse trees. Lisp uses a serialized hierarchical data format of a tokenizer. S-expressions are not Lisp syntax trees, but a data format.