You know, I get a lot of grief from the handle.  One guy went so far
as to flame me because of it on the EGCS mailing list (even though I
was on topics, etc.)

    SF> I suggest you look at the CMU Common Lisp sources, available
    SF> under "http://www.cons.org/cmucl/".  There you will find a
    SF> complete public-domain implementation of CL, implemented in CL
    SF> itself.

A great deal of my difficulties in trying to figure out how to
implement Common Lisp is due to the fact that so many example
implementations are written in Lisp.  I'm trying to implement a
compiler and run-time in C, if only because that is the language GCC
is written in, and I'm running into a variant on "which came first"
each time I see a Lisp facility described.

It is very frustrating because I cannot nail down a subset of Common
Lisp to implement.  With C, I have a fairly clear division between the
C language and the C standard library.  With Lisp, so much of the
language *is* the standard library that it makes identifying
primitives very difficult.

(Of course, I could be making this way too hard or misunderstanding
something fundamental, which is why I asked whether it is OK to post
the I'm-writing-an-implementation-type questions on this newsgroup.)