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That seems like an awful convenience -- isn't it far easier to recall that all lists must be quoted, than to remember which are auto-quoted under which circumstances?

It's not quite readline, but if you start the interpreter as `pil +', you get better editing and history and some nice things like `(doc 'sym)'

That could be a backward-compatible extension in any mainstream Lisp, because the form (1 ...) is otherwise invalid.

Interestingly, in PicoLisp, if the car of a list evaluates to a number (but isn't a literal), it's taken to be the address of an fsubr (this is how all of the builtins are implemented; if you evaluate their symbols, you'll see they're bound to integers). If you want to do this with a literal number, you have to quote it, like ('1 2 3)

Did you mean rlwrap rather than wlwrap?

yes I did thanks for the correction

This forbids any numeric function names. But ok, the trick is nice.