4 ms·

Agreed, but it's not just the parentheses - "car-or-zero"? Really? If you have a language where you can say "at least it's not APL", that's not a feature...

• hga 10y ago
  That's where Common Lisp's roots that go back to the first version that ran as subroutines to punched card FORTRAN on a vacuum tube IBM computer show. Contents of Address and Decrement Registers -> car and cdr, for normal list processing they're often renamed or aliased first and rest. BUT, they hang around because of old code, and they're composable, e.g. the 2nd Lisp Machine design and first to be semi-mass produced was the CADR, as in (car (cdr list)), or (first (rest *list)), is in the 2nd item in the list. So, yeah, if you don't want to have to learn a lot of arcane stuff that's incidental complexity purely because of history, go for newer dialects like Scheme and Clojure which had the opportunity to rationalize a lot of this (but Scheme at least still has cadr and company because they're too useful).
  • mdpopescu 10y ago
    Oh, I know the history, I just dislike "because we've always done it this way" as a rule. Imagine having a code full of "moo x > 5", with "moo" instead of "if" because that was the sound made by the favorite pet of the initial programmer...