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I think comp.lang.lisp had this discussion 10 years ago and the "core language" semantics of Common Lisp is something like 25-30 functions/operators. Rest of the language could be a separated into libraries.

But even with the all those 'libraries' COMMON-LISP package has just 978 external symbols.




In TXR Lisp, I seem to have nearly double that in the analogous public library package called usr:

  1> (len (keep-if [orf boundp mboundp fboundp] (package-symbols 'usr)))
  1713
That's just a one-man project coming up to ten years two months hence.

That doesn't count any structure types or their slot names, FFI types, and local macros involved in syntaxes like awk and such.

I would say that Common Lisp shows amazing restraint, given its scope and number of people involved.




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