> And it’s huge. The INCITS 226–1994 standard consists of 1153 pages. This was only beaten by C++ ISO/IEC 14882:2011 standard with 1338 pages some 17 years afte

> And it’s huge. The INCITS 226–1994 standard consists of 1153 pages. This was only beaten by C++ ISO/IEC 14882:2011 standard with 1338 pages some 17 years after. C++ has to drag a bag of heritage though, it was not always that big. Common Lisp was created huge from the scratch. Common Lisp the Language was published in 1984 and it had 460+ pages. Heritage? The language itself was mostly based on a larger earlier language: Lisp Machine Lisp. That one had a language documentation, but not a standard. The standard for Common Lisp was published in 1994, after eight years of work from 1986 on. It was based on the 1984 Common Lisp, which was based on NIL, S-1 Lisp, Lisp Machine Lisp and Spice Lisp - all projects which developed a successor of Maclisp. > A programming language should not be that huge. Not at all. It’s just that it should have a decent standard library filled with all the goodies so people wouldn't have to reinvent them. Common Lisp in part is a larger Lisp dialect (but with a relatively small number of built-in constructs: http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_ababa.htm http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/03_aba... ) and the standard includes a standard library - without actually dividing the language into a core and a library.