Actually Common Lisp and Scheme have a clear distinction between mutating and non-mutating list functions. They even have a naming schema to distinguish between

Actually Common Lisp and Scheme have a clear distinction between mutating and non-mutating list functions. They even have a naming schema to distinguish between, and most books focus on the non-mutating, in Common Lisp speak "nondestructive" list functions. Functions like append, remove do not mutate the input list, but (partially) new lists, which can share sublists with the input lists. For example (append a b) returns a list which contains a copy of a and the original b.