Re:The Lisp Curse (2011)
by kruhft on Thursday February 25, 2016 @11:50AM
(#11175682)
Yes, sometimes 'car' and 'cdr' are replaced with 'first' and 'rest' and are some of the first things you cover when learning the language, so I don't think the names would really be hindering adoption for those that try to learn the language. The benefits of car and cdr are that they can be composed: (caadr l) instead of (car (car (cdr l))) for example.
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Re:The Lisp Curse (2011)
by AnimalMuppet on Thursday February 25, 2016 @01:14PM
(#11176388)
Well, if you use "first" and "rest", then (caadr l) could become (firrest l) or something like that...
Re:The Lisp Curse (2011)
by bhrgunatha on Thursday February 25, 2016 @09:38PM
(#11179498)
I like Racket's second, third, fourth,... etc. [1]
I don't think there's an equivalent to cddadr for example, but at that level of deconstruction you're better off abstracting the data structure (maybe a struct [2]) or using some other mechanism like match [3]
[1] http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/pairs.html?q=second#%2...
[2] http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/define-struct.html?q=s...
[3] http://docs.racket-lang.org/reference/match.html?q=match#%28...