> [...] meaning there will always be rigid syntax within lisp (its parentheses or the fact that it needs to have characters that tell lisp to read ahead).

They are talking about CL reader macros here. You can use a different tokenizer in CL with reader macros, but you have to use an expression in the read table to say that you're switching tokenizers. It seems like in Cognition you can call a function and that will switch tokenizers in the callers context.