[illvm]

Could it be that, at least some, university teach programming languages with the idea that Lisp has this feature? My PL course at Northeastern had SHLAC (Scheme Has Lambda Calculus) where we started with an identity function and built up from there.

[vga805]

That seems likely. But then, I would think LISP does realize the lambda calculus in some sense. It naturally lends itself to this sort of exercise and it's really successful.