We're using object-oriented languages like Java on modern hardware, so pointer chasing is quite natural. Typical Java programs will do that all the time. In man

We're using object-oriented languages like Java on modern hardware, so pointer chasing is quite natural. Typical Java programs will do that all the time. In many ways the Java runtime is relatively similar to a Lisp runtime - it's just not tailored on the low-level to Lisp - for example cons cells for linked lists are not provided on the virtual machine level. Since lists in typical Lisp implementations are made with cons cells, some form of two element data structure is needed. Using Java objects has the drawback, that this is not the most efficient representation. Good Lisp implementations typically make sure that the cons cell has very little overhead: * cons cells are just objects made of two memory words without type tag. The tag is encoded in pointers to these cons cells. * cons cells can directly encode some simple data like fixnum integers, characters, ... * cons cells might be allocated in special memory regions and GCs might take special care OTOH, more efficient low-level representations like CDR-coding, which allows some lists to be represented in vector like ways is mostly not used in current implementations, since it was not see worth the effort anymore - it was thought worth on older systems with much small main memories than we have today. Smaller main memories than the caches on a modern CPU.