HACKER Q&A
📣 _bxg1

What functions/forms should all lisps have?


I'm writing a lisp and I'm curious if there's a consensus on what constitutes a "minimum lisp". I'm not planning to implement the full extent of Common Lisp, and probably not even Scheme, but I'd like mine to have all of the basics, whatever "the basics" are expected to be.

Any resources or suggestions on this? So far I've got car/cdr/cons, list, all the basic math operators, print, lambda, and/or/not, basic equality and numeric comparisons, eval, define, begin (block), cond, and if.


  👤 kazinator Accepted Answer ✓
- Characters and strings.

- Support for making a program using multiple files, and I/O.

- Error recovery


👤 db48x
Minimal might not be the word you're looking for; a truly minimal lisp just has lambdas, from which you can implement everything else.