Anton van Straaten <anton@appsolutions.com> wrote:
+---------------
| Jeff Dalton wrote:
| > But the idea of a core plus macros was present in CL.
| > There was a relatively small set of (24) "special forms"
| > and no way to define more, only macros.  ...
| 
| Is there a list of the 24 somewhere?  The "CL core spec" would be
| something I'd find interesting, but it seems rather buried within
| the larger standards and references. 
+---------------

Barely two weeks ago, someone posed the question "Are there any
'special operators' in Lisp?" (as opposed to macros), to which I
posted an answer ["Yes; and no, not necessarily (but maybe)"].
The key references were the CLHS "3.1.2.1.2.1 Special Forms",
which has a list of 25 (not 24) special operators. But...

CLHS "3.1.2.1.2.2 Macro Forms" also says:

    An implementation is free to implement a Common Lisp special
    operator as a macro.

And conversely:

    An implementation is free to implement any macro operator as a
    special operator, but only if an equivalent definition of the
    macro is also provided.


-Rob

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