But this is exactly my point: if your "code" is different than your "pseudocode", something is wrong. There's a reason why people call Lisp "executable pseudocode", and it's because it shrinks the gap between the human-level description of what needs to happen and the text that is required to actually get there. (There will always be a gap, because no one understands the requirements perfectly. But at least it won't be exacerbated by irrelevant details.)

To me, reading the prompt example half a dozen levels up, reminds me of Greenspun's tenth rule:

> Any sufficiently complicated C++ program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp. [1]

But now the "program" doesn't even have formal semantics and isn't a permanent artifact. It's like running a compiler and then throwing away the source program and only hand-editing the machine code when you don't like what it does. To me that seems crazy and misses many of the most important lessons from the last half-century.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule (paraphrased to use C++, but applies equally to most similar languages)