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Re: Easy to add with push but not to the end of a list


From: Dr Rainer Woitok
Subject: Re: Easy to add with push but not to the end of a list
Date: Tue, 29 Nov 2022 13:08:00 +0100

Tomas,

On Tuesday, 2022-11-29 09:44:48 +0100, you wrote:

> ...
> There are big precedents out there (cf. for example Donald Knuth's
> WEB for TeX and METAFONT; it seems to have been in the air for
> some time -- vestiges of that can be found in the shells (if -- fi,
> case -- esac and so on; pity Lisp must have been a tad early;
> otherwise we might have car -- rac, definitely a better sound than
> cdr).

While this would be feasible  for these two functions,  it wouldn't work
for "caddr" and ilk :-)

I faintly remember  discussions back in  the early seventies  to replace
"car" and "cdr"  (which originally stood for "Contents of Address Regis-
ter" and "Contents of Decrement Register", respectively, and referred to
machine instructions on some then modern PDP hardware which were used to
access the two pointers of a cons) with "fst" and "rst" (for "first" and
"rest", respectively) which could even be nicely combined to "frrst" and
similar.  But this proposal never made it :-(

Sincerely,
  Rainer



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