... all the counts by me and by Diffie are somewhat flawed due to our laziness about not really counting things "right".
It wasn't laziness on my part (although I have plenty); I didn't know what you wanted. It wouldn't be difficult to produce counts of two sorts of primitives. I could do this study on my code, counting only the lisp commands I did not write myself or I could do it on the system code and count only the ones defined in C. That is easy to get from the documentation system and I believe I can send a list without much trouble. I believe that Allan Wechsler is right in thinking that lots of the Elisp primitives are about the data structures. Weeding those out would take more judgement. Presumably plus and times are about the fact that a language does arithmetic. As I said earlier, I think a count of words in Common Lisp would be rather different. Whit