Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?

[Emanuel Berg]

Random832 <random832@fastmail.com> writes:

> The thing is, if you can car a string people will
> wonder why you can't cdr it. And with mutable
> objects it's hard to make cdr work right. (fsvo
> "right")

You can't `car' a string or do anything with it that
requires it to be a list, because it isn't. If you try
to car it, the string will fail the `listp' test.
But because it is natural to think of strings as lists
of chars, perhaps from the C days of, say

    char *str = malloc(strlen(argv[argc - 1]));

or actually because it is normal for humans to think
of strings that way, it should be pointed out - and
now that has happened - that the "string" syntax isn't
a shorthand for creating lists of chars.

-- 
underground experts united
http://user.it.uu.se/~embe8573