If you want to prevent that then you want to take general recursion out of your programming language and if you're gonna do that you might as well make it Turing incomplete.

These aren't "circles" per se, they are partially evaluated recursive structures. If you expand them you end up with evaluated list structures that are non-self referential.

This is not a real circular list though, since it does not tie the knot as in dbaupp's comment.