I suppose 5 is better than lots but you can totally write a lisp with zero keywords. I'm not sure what a syntactic form means here - dot as in dotted pair, nil

I suppose 5 is better than lots but you can totally write a lisp with zero keywords. I'm not sure what a syntactic form means here - dot as in dotted pair, nil, quote, quasiquote, parens? Having trouble coming up with 8 distinct syntactic things. The basis set underlying lisp is something like the lambda calculus with optional delayed evaluation, a product type and some file I/O. The optimal basis set for computation is either non-unique or not yet discovered as far as I can tell - different people arrive at different combinations.