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Contrary to popular belief, LISP was not originally derived from Church's λ-calculus [Church] [LISP History]. The earliest LISP did not have a well-defined notion of free variables or procedural objects. Early LISP programs were similar to recursion equations, defining functions on symbolic expressions ("S-expressions"). They differed from the equations of pure recursive function theory [Kleene] by introducing the conditional expression construction (often called the "McCarthy conditional"), to avoid "pattern-directed invocation". That is, in recursive function theory one would define the factorial function by the following two equations:

In early LISP, however, one would have written:

where "[a → b; T → c]" essentially means " a b  c". The recursive function theory version depends on selecting which of two equations to use by matching the argument to the left-hand sides (such a discipline is actually used in the PROLOG language [Warren]); the early LISP version represents this decision as a conditional expression.

The theory of recursion equations deals with functions over the natural numbers. In LISP, however, one is interested in being able to manipulate algebraic expressions, programs, and other symbolic expressions as data structures. While such expressions can be encoded as numbers (using the technique of "arithmetization" developed by Kurt Gödel), such an encoding is not very convenient. Instead, a new kind of data called "S-expressions" (for "symbolic expressions") is introduced specifically to provide convenient encodings. S-expressions can be defined by a set of formal inductive axioms analogous to the Peano postulates used to define natural numbers. Here we will give only an informal and incomplete definition of S-expressions; for a more complete description, see {Note S-expression Postulates and Notation}.

For our purposes we will need only the special cases of S-expressions called and. An atom is an "indivisible" data object, which we denote by writing a string of letters and digits; if only digits are used, then the atom is considered to be a number. Many special characters such as "-" and "+" are considered to be letters; we will see below that it is not necessary to specially reserve them for use as operator symbols. A list is a (possibly empty) sequence of S-expressions, notated by writing the S-expressions in order, between a set of parentheses