[paddy_m]

Paper?

I once read a lisp paper that kept defining lisp primitives in terms of simpler lisp primitives until they had only 4-10 primitives. Then the paper started defining those in terms of assembly language (but with parens). In the final step, they just removed the parens. It was so elegant. I can't find the paper though :( Any ideas?

[aap_]

The paper is the original paper on LISP by McCarthy "Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I". It has the original definition of LISP in LISP.