Funny thing: some C and C++ programmers who swear they could never work with the parenthesized expressions of Lisp somehow have no trouble churning out complicated GNU makefiles with cruft like $(filter-out $(patsubst %,%/d,$(foo foo bar, xyzzy) ...) ad nauseum. Note how the parenthesis is outside the function name. It must be the dollar sign somehow softens it, plus the comma separators that are required after the second argument.