Firstly, this still requires a mechanism which underlies the [ ... ] notation for evaluating a sequence of any number of expressions and constructing a list.
In Lisp dialects, that is done by a variadic function:
(list 1 2 3 4 ...)
Of course, if we don't need to indirect on this function, we could implement it as a macro (supposing further that we have variadic macros for compile time, but not variadic functions for run time).
The macro would turn (list 1 2 3) into the non-variadic calls (cons 1 (cons 2 (cons 3 nil))).
I imagine that's a conceptual facsimile of what Erlang's list constructor notation is doing.
Erlang has variadic features in its read syntax; without a doubt its BNF is chock full of "zero or more of ..." grammar productions. The function defining mechanism lets you define a function which has any number of arguments; just that number has to be fixed for that function. So the mechanism itself enjoys variadic application. Here it is asked to define a three-arg function, here a ten-arg, ...
We can simulate some aspects of variadic application with syntactic sugar, but not all. A Lisp function call which specifies five arguments can call a function which requires exactly five arguments, or a function which requires three arguments, followed by variadic ones.
For instance, if we have a callback registration interface that passes five arguments, the client can supply a fixed arity function, or a variadic one.
I suppose that if everything is static, that can still be worked out. The compiler sees that a variadic function with only two required args is passed as a callback that must be 5-ary, so it inserts a conversion shim: an anonymous function which takes exactly 5 parameters and applies them to the 3+rest function.
