I suppose my original point was that its not obvious, because
(+ 1 2 3) behaves differently than (> 1 2 3). Mapping a binary operator to a list is obvious if the type of the result is different than the type of the operands.
I also find 'Less characters to type' a weak argument at the level of a handful of plus signs, but I grant that once you've made the mental leap there is less cognitive overhead. In the '(> x y z)' if I knew to read '>' as 'is descending' the meaning would have been obvious, but reading it as 'greater than' didn't make sense to me.
If you can agree that (> a b) makes easy sense, that a is greater than b (it's the same symbol as a > b, just in a different place), then I don't see how that's any more difficult than (> a b c), which means that b is also greater than c. But then I've been staring at lisp code for years.
I also find 'Less characters to type' a weak argument at the level of a handful of plus signs, but I grant that once you've made the mental leap there is less cognitive overhead. In the '(> x y z)' if I knew to read '>' as 'is descending' the meaning would have been obvious, but reading it as 'greater than' didn't make sense to me.