However, McCarthy and his team actually tried to use Fortran as the implementation language for the first LISP compiler, but Fortran was not in the mood to cooperate. Before C, nothing could beat Assembler, I guess...
Byte September 1981 did have a nontrivial program in Lisp: it parsed, differentiated, and simplified algebraic expressions. (I remember it fondly as my first Byte issue and first exposure to Lisp and calculus, the latter two almost equally mysterious. But going back and rereading the code, it was amateurish.)
I don't remember any Lisp in Basic in either Byte or DDJ, and I'd have probably seen it.
I was thinking about this. Also everytime I have been forced to find a solution without using the internet I have been thrilled about what I learned. Too bad I never make that happen more often... :(
I haven't inspected it in detail, but it goes to show again how little you need to implement something LISP-y. My first LISP was built in C, which feels almost banal in comparison (it was longer, too).