Having said that, the Hyperspec is as far as I can tell so bad as learning material because it's mostly prescriptive, not descriptive, i.e. it's the system *implementer* who needs to "accommodate the language on X hardware" and ensure that top-level progn forms are handled this and not that way. You might be better off starting with McCarthy's Lisp manual, then building up from there.

Which isn't to say that this Hyperspec review is in itself a bad idea, I for one have really enjoyed reading so far.

Apparently Lispers have this tendency to come up with weird toy examples, huh?

> Next, from the existence of this helper function in the documentation, can I then conclude that no standard function has been specified to generate a sequence of consecutive integers?

Not AFAIK. I don't recall ever using a specific function for this purpose myself.

> this also be done with special syntax? note to self: this list function is a good candidate for a next post

Likbez on "list" versus quotation: list is generally used to build lists whose elements have been evaluated beforehand, i.e. when the call was made. Meanwhile, quotes, quasiquotes (the backquote thingie) and unquotes (the comma thingie) are used to define (usually compile-time) expressions and control the evaluation within them. For example:

> (defparameter x 1)
X
> (list x 2 3)
(1 2 3)
> '(x 2 3)
(X 2 3)
> `(,x 2 3)

Note however a fundamental difference between how they work:

> (defparameter *a-list* nil)
*A-LIST*
> (defun f(x)
(push (list x 'a 'b) *a-list*))
F
> (f 1) (f 2)
((2 A B) (1 A B))
> (setf (cadar *a-list*) 'd)
D
> *a-list*
((2 D B) (1 A B))
> (defun g (x)
(push `(,x a b) *a-list*))
G
> (setq *a-list* nil) (g 1) (g 2)
((2 A B) (1 A B))
> (setf (cadar *a-list*) 'd)
D
> *a-list*
((2 D B) (1 D B))

sed -n "s/CLHS: Function \(.*\)/\1/p" * | tr ', ' '\n'|sed '/^$/d' | wc -l

GIves a count of: 438 functions!

You are absolutely right ; and cop-out however they might attempt, the lisp folks are guilty of perlthought here, no question about it.

The likely reason 1st generation started doing it (in the 90s) was the perception that precise numbers are scary to [imbecile] undergrads, based as it was in fact, derived from direct experience in US "colleges" ; and then the guilty expectation that imbecile undergrads are all the undergrads, and that the goal of education is socialism and no imbecile left behind instead of republic, painful & humiliating evisceration of imbeciles and the cult of the elite ; and so they "adapted".

By now this continues out of mere inertia, the imbecile undergrads just continue the world they saw, which was the subset of the world that the guilty showed them, an inconsequential and fundamentally false subset of the actual world.