On this site they say there are 10 LISP primitives. The primitives are: atom quote eq car cdr cons cond lambda label

On this site they say there are 10 LISP primitives. The primitives are: atom quote eq car cdr cons cond lambda label apply http://hyperpolyglot.wikidot.com/lisp#ten-primitives http://hyperpolyglot.wikidot.com/lisp#ten-primitives Steve Yegge reckons there are seven or five: Its part of the purity of the idea of LISP: you only need the seven (or is it five?) primitives to build the full machine. http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptable-lisp.html http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/04/lisp-is-not-acceptab... McCarthy had five: atom eq car cdr cons http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf McCarthy then added another four: quote cond lambda label So according to McCarthy - the answer is nine. See here for a more in depth discussion: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3482389/how-many-primitives-does-it-take-to-build-a-lisp-machine-ten-seven-or-five/ http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3482389/how-many-primitiv...