Subject: Re: why we have cons?
From: Erik Naggum <clerik@naggum.no>
Date: 1998/01/04
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3092944816519868@naggum.no>


* Axel Schairer
| 2) However it annoys me everytime I make a stupid mistake (like building
| up a dotted list instead of a proper list) that is not trapped by lisp
| (if I call rest on a dotted pair I made an error, but lisp won't
| complain) but would have been illegal in, say, ML.  So, contrary to what
| Eric said for himself, I would profit in this respect if a list was not
| at the same time a pair.

ah, but this is a valid point I had not considered.  I tend to use `endp'
when traversing lists, so I do get very loud complaints.  if you check for
the end of the list with any other test, such as identity with nil, I can
see that you would get problems, but I imagine that `endp' would solve them
in practice if not (completely satisfactorily) in theory.

#\Erik
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