As a practical matter, this would require the enforcement agency to publish the correct price for every asset regulated.
Publishing a formula for this calculation wouldn't be good enough, because then you would be required to value things based on the formula and that leads you back to...accounting.
I know the lisp community stands behind Edi Weitz and I respect him, but compared to Python's "Batteries Included" or Perl's standard regular expression library, your solution is problematic. Consider: Weitz's library is just one of five possible regular expression libraries listed on Cliki! Why did you choose his? Weitz's library isn't even the top choice! Are the others broken? Unreliable? Do I have to try them all?
Now, I realize such simple questions as these may not be "breaking new ground in programming theory," but a lot us just want a turn-key solution that works everywhere; the sort that sysadmins use everyday to keep companies humming and the internet buzzing.
That's the definition of "practical" that I'm hung up on.
If I want to do command line text processing with pipes--and many do--how does lisp help me more than Awk? Awk is brilliant in its problem space; it's fairly standardized; it's guaranteed to be everywhere. Choosing Awk or Perl or Python is practical--not being a slave to fashion (trapped in the popularity contest you allude to)
I think you know this, and I think you know just how practical Python/Perl/Awk/Ruby are, which is why you subtly changed your argument from "practical" without qualification to "managing huge and complex problems" by the end of your response, even though the parent specifically includes hobby programming in his classification of "practical" problems.
I think it's cool that you've done "web, database, scripting, 3D game programming, etc" in lisp and can even think in lisp. And I admire your willingness to battle past CL's 1000+ page spec and then the sea of competing libraries to find the one you like and are willing to debug yourself if something is broken.
But that doesn't invalidate all the other tools--it just means there can be more than one way to do it.
Since you are hung up on "objective analysis," what objective evidence do you have that this claim is true?
In any case, here is an objective problem: Common Lisp does not include a standard for regular expressions.
That isn't anecdotal and it isn't misplaced blame and it isn't an unnamed idiosyncrasy. It's a failure within the CL standard to include one of the most powerful tools around for text processing--a tool that pretty much every dynamic language includes.
I've tried using lisp before for text processing and found it brutal--practically impossible--compared to other dynamic languages. That isn't due to popularity, it's because python and perl and awk have built-in facilities for manipulating the hell out of text that sit right on the surface, were easy to find, and work well. Despite having lots of functions for chars and strings, common lisp never felt anywhere as easy for those tasks.
If I'm wrong, then I will look forward to being educated, but I honestly believe that practical limits have everything to do with why people don't turn to CL for scripting.
If it wasn't for Mint Linux standing on top of Ubuntu standing on top of Debian with Debian's apt-get repository, I probably would have switched to Mac.
Interestingly, most of my favorite desktop apps are written in C++ (Chrome, Firefox, OpenOffice, Lyx, Kivio, CodeBlocks, Inkscape, etc...).
Not to mention the fact that most times, it's easier to go through the line with a check-out person running the register. Not only do they do the work, but the self check-out lines at grocery stores often aren't set up for buying a lot of items.
If you have more than five things, it's typically easier just to let the check-out person do it for you.