3 ms·

If your reading material Lisp doesn't have some form of defstruct then it certainly is dated, or they are avoiding it on purpose. Every non-toy Lisp has it.

• jacquesm 16y ago
  Ok, thanks. That helps. I started 'from the ground up', I figured that the best way to study a language is by looking at the way it was in the beginning since that's the most pure form of it. If 'lists' are as great as they are said to be you'd expect that things like structs and classes are optimizations, not essentials.
  • mahmud 16y ago
    Restricting yourself to Pure Lisp is like insisting on only dating virgins.
    • jacquesm 16y ago
      I have a very snappy comeback to that one but I highly doubt it will pass the censor ;)
      • eru 16y ago
        How about: "If she wasn't good enough for the other people, she won't be good enough for me."
  • jules 16y ago
    Yeah, you can view it as an optimization: you can build defstruct & co on top of lists with macros. However, using ca(d)*r by hand is not advisable in any case... Usually it goes the other way around: you implement lists on top of defstruct.
  • eru 16y ago
    Don't do that for Lisp. You will be stuck with the dynamic scoping that Lisp used to be plagued with in the beginning. Go far a modern Lisp like Scheme. (You can ignore the syntax you don't want to deal with, yet.)