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> If you don't understand why cons is important, and the appropriate places to use it, then you really don't understand Lisp. Lisp-the-mathematical-model, perh
by wtbob 10y ago
> If you don't understand why cons is important, and the appropriate places to use it, then you really don't understand Lisp.
Lisp-the-mathematical-model, perhaps, but not Lisp-the-programming-language.
Conses are definitely a fundamental idea, and they're obviously how source code is written, and it's nice that they're around — but honestly for real work it's unlikely that most data will live in cons structures (unless of course the higher-level data structures actually are built from conses, which of course they could be).
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- nocman 10y agoAt what point did I say "most data will live in cons structures"? And I explicitly said I would not use them for everything. And no, it isn't just "Lisp-the-mathematical-model", cons cells have real-world implications to the language. I was going to suggest watching the video presentation "The Swine Before Perl", by Shriram Krishnamurthi, but alas I can't find a link to the video (which is sad, because it is a very entertaining and informative video). The slides are here: ( http://ll1.ai.mit.edu/shriram-talk.pdf http://ll1.ai.mit.edu/shriram-talk.pdf ), but without the talk they may do you no good. Hopefully someone will see this and add a link to the video ( it should be made available again, even after all of this time, it is still great -- I believe I saw it as recently as 2 years ago).