It is a bit similar. The first versions in Lisp 1.0 and the Lisp 1.5 paper were working, but not fully refined. SICP and others later presented it a bit more refined in my opinion.

There's also version for the metacirculator interpreter written in full on M-expr, but they kinda break the spirit of things.

I think the version of eval that we have is already pretty terse for what it is. You could maybe code-golf it into something smaller, or you could code-golf it into something fully immutable.

My only gripe is that they all rely on an already existing reader that parses the expressions for you and represents them. Which is exactly what the book is about.

Finding a small enough interpretation that does ALL of it would be a dream, but I doubt it could be anywhere near as concise as the (modern) Maxwell equations.

It's hard to get a super compact eval for LISP with its many primitives. It's somewhat easier for the lambda calculus which inspired LISP, with obnly the 3 primitives of variable, abstraction, and application. In the binary lambda calculus this allows for a self-interpreter

    (λ 1 1) (λ λ λ 1 (λ λ λ λ 3 (λ 5 (3 (λ 2 (3 (λ λ 3 (λ 1 2 3))) (4 (λ 4
    (λ 3 1 (2 1)))))) (1 (2 (λ 1 2)) (λ 4 (λ 4 (λ 2 (1 4))) 5)))) (3 3) 2)

that tokenizes and parses a closed lambda term from a raw binary input stream and passes the term and the remainder stream to a given continuation [1].

[1] https://tromp.github.io/cl/cl.html

>later someone (Gibbs?) gave them the familiar vector calculus form.

It was Oliver Heaviside (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Heaviside) that rewrote Maxwell's original equations (20 of them in differential form) into the notation used today (4 of them in vector calculus form).

Here's a nice comparison: https://ddcolrs.wordpress.com/2018/01/17/maxwells-equations-...