Comment by anthk

Boot sector Lisp bootstraps itself.

Also, lots of Lisp from https://t3x.org implement numerals (and the rest of stuff) from cons cells and apply/eval:

'John McCarthy discovered an elegant self-defining way to compute the above steps, more commonly known as the metacircular evaluator. Alan Kay once described this code as the "Maxwell's equations of software". Here are those equations as implemented by SectorLISP:

ASSOC EVAL EVCON APPLY EVLIS PAIRLIS '

Ditto with some Forths.

Back to T3X, he author has Zenlisp where the meta-circular evaluation it's basically how to define eval/apply and how to they ared called between themselves in a recursive way.

http://t3x.org/zsp/index.html