I am very certain that almost all of them could be removed without reducing the theoretical power of Common Lisp. At worst, successive rewrites of the program could reduce it to using a different set of simpler forms.
Well yeah, you don't need all those special forms to keep the language Turing complete, but you do need them to provide a lot of what people regard as the "powerful" features of common lisp. I wouldn't care to program without flet, for example, but obviously one could remove flet without any loss of power in a certain sense.
No, I mean that you could create a Lisp which had fewer forms, but that provided these special forms - that you would program using - except that they would no longer be special, but rather synthesized out of baser forms.
