> "Practical Common Lisp"--Copyright 2012--gets it right and deserves to be called out for that. Hashes and Vectors appear BEFORE lists in the book Did you rea

> "Practical Common Lisp"--Copyright 2012--gets it right and deserves to be called out for that. Hashes and Vectors appear BEFORE lists in the book Did you read the book? The book is from 2005. Lists are introduced in chapter 3 with a practical example, a simple database. The Touretzky edition I mentioned is from 1990. Actually lists are the main fundamental data type in Lisp (well, it's also called as an abbreviation of 'List Processor'), which sets it apart from many other programming languages and is the reason of its existence. The basic idea of Lisp is that one can do many practical things with lists. Let's look further in your claim that it would be hard to find introductory Lisp books with mentioning arrays. Paul Graham wrote published in 1996 the book ANSI Common Lisp. Arrays appear in chapter 4 together with strings (1d arrays/ vectors), sequences (a data type joining lists and vectors), structures (records) and hash tables. Winston&Horn, 3rd Edition of 1989. Arrays are in chapter 11. But from that book we get a good idea through practical examples that one can do a lot of interesting things with lists. Another book, the 'Common Lisp Companion' from 1990. Vectors, strings, arrays, sequences, hash-tables appear in chapter 4. > Perl was dominant for text processing and early web server scripting... For example I can't remember much in NeXTStep or MacOS that made use of Perl (or Lisp) in any crucial way. The OS and its applications were written largely in C, C++ and Objective C.