> it most commonly refers to Common Lisp That's not my experience at all. "Common Lisp" is used to refer specifically to Common Lisp. "Lisp" refers to the enti

> it most commonly refers to Common Lisp That's not my experience at all. "Common Lisp" is used to refer specifically to Common Lisp. "Lisp" refers to the entire Lisp family. When I took SICP at MIT, Sussman and Ableson referred to Scheme as "Lisp" more often than they referred to it as "Scheme". Check the online video taped lectures if you don't believe me. Additionally, lists in Lisp are the definitive persistent functional data structure. Sure, you can use rplaca and rplacd to modify a list, but this is very rare (not to mention dangerous) to do. Also, courses taught using Lisp typically focus on recursive solutions.