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


From: Emanuel Berg
Subject: Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?
Date: Sat, 17 Oct 2015 01:30:50 +0200
User-agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.4 (gnu/linux)

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




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