>After coding his recursive solution, the Lisp hacker is more likely to ask the irrelevant question: how can I reduce these two functions down to one function?

>After coding his recursive solution, the Lisp hacker is more likely to ask the irrelevant question: how can I reduce these two functions down to one function? Why would the Lisp hacker ask that? That makes no sense. There is no reason to combine those two functions.