Lisp according to one Pascal programmer

[John D. Ramsdell <ramsdell%linus@mitre-bedford.ARPA>]

Normally, I avoid reading journals with the name of a programming
language in their title whenever the journal is about that programming
language.  Those journals tend to contain disappointing articles.  

My curiousity was peeked by an article by Morteza Marzjarani called "A
Comparison of the Computer Languages Pascal, C, Lisp, and Ada" in the
Journal of Pascal, Ada, & Modula-2, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 5-10, 1988.
What would someone from that journal say about Lisp?

Turning to the reference list of Marzjarani's article, I noticed the
only Lisp reference was Abelson and Sussman's "Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs".  I concluded the dialect of Lisp
for comparison was Scheme.

Turning to the main text I found that Lisp is not block structured,
and "LISP has two data types only, ATOM and LIST" {p. 6}.  Did you
know that "An A-list (association list) represents referencing
environment.  That is referencing in LISP is strictly according to the
most recent association rule via searching the A-list from beginning
to end for an entry whose CAR is the atom we are searching for."? {p. 7}
Features of LISP include {p. 8}
	"Explicit garbage collection", 
	"No data structures", 
	"Explicit sequencing is eliminated; 
             instead function calls are used", 
	"Two reserved words only (T,NIL)",
	"Linked lists and property list (represented as a special
	     case of linked lists) form the basic data structures", and
	"Most LISP output is automatic.  For each function call the
	     system prints out the function name, its arguments, and
	     the value returned by the function".

Somehow, I think Morteza doesn't know how to turn of tracing in his
Lisp and has never opened Abelson and Sussman's book.
John