"Building a native-code-generating Lisp would not be an unreasonable learn- a- new- language project." Eh, I do not think it is terribly hard if optimizations

"Building a native-code-generating Lisp would not be an unreasonable learn- a- new- language project." Eh, I do not think it is terribly hard if optimizations are not a concern. Yeah, CLtL2 is rather lengthy, but the bulk of it can be implemented with macros and functions if you just want something that will work. I suppose implementing those macros/functions might teach you the language, but I think you would learn a whole lot more implementing something else (say, an email client).