Interesting, I liked l.i.s.p gradual exploration of various traits and the various reimplementations. But that's right it avoids many low level bits. It seems a cultural trait, since McCarthy's paper was also a virtual metacircular description.
About low level interfaces, there's another french book from back in the days:
About low level interfaces, there's another french book from back in the days:
La programmation applicative : de LISP à la machine en passant par le lambda-calcul by Emmanuel Saint-James (also a colleaguerof C.Queinnec) (https://www.amazon.com/programmation-applicative-Emmanuel-Sa...)
Which, IIRC talks about IO at least (maybe gc, i forgot).