Elisps rplacd vs CL's one

Elisps rplacd vs CL's one

[Marcin Borkowski]

Hi all,

Emacs Lisp's rplacd and Common Lisp's RPLACD are called the same, but
behave differently (ELisp's one returns the NEWCDR and CL's one returns
the modified cons).  What is the reason for that?  Is it an accident?
While I do understand that EL ≠ CL, having a function called the same in
both, doing roughly the same thing, but not quite, seems a bit
misleading, and I was just curious whether there was a deep reason for
that.

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

Re: Elisps rplacd vs CL's one

[Stefan Monnier]

> Emacs Lisp's rplacd and Common Lisp's RPLACD are called the same, but
> behave differently (ELisp's one returns the NEWCDR and CL's one returns
> the modified cons).  What is the reason for that?  Is it an accident?
> While I do understand that EL ≠ CL, having a function called the same in
> both, doing roughly the same thing, but not quite, seems a bit
> misleading, and I was just curious whether there was a deep reason for
> that.

FWIW, I consider the use of rplacd's return value to be a very bad idea.


        Stefan

Re: Elisps rplacd vs CL's one

[Marcin Borkowski]

On 2015-08-30, at 00:05, Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> wrote:

> FWIW, I consider the use of rplacd's return value to be a very bad idea.

I stumbled on it while studying the implementation of APPEND in CCL
(sent to the list by Pascal some time ago).

>         Stefan

Best,

-- 
Marcin Borkowski
http://octd.wmi.amu.edu.pl/en/Marcin_Borkowski
Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science
Adam Mickiewicz University

Re: Elisps rplacd vs CL's one

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl> writes:

> Emacs Lisp's rplacd and Common Lisp's RPLACD are called the same, but
> behave differently (ELisp's one returns the NEWCDR and CL's one returns
> the modified cons).  What is the reason for that?  Is it an accident?
> While I do understand that EL ≠ CL, having a function called the same in
> both, doing roughly the same thing, but not quite, seems a bit
> misleading, and I was just curious whether there was a deep reason for
> that.

RPLACA in LISP 1.5 returned the CONS cell.  Common Lisp follows suit.

Notice that in CL, SETF should return the last value assigned (user
defined setters could break this convention). 

So in CL, (setf (car x) y) returns y
while     (rplaca x y)     returns x.

On the other hand, in emacs lisp:

    (let ((x (cons 1 2)))
      (list (setf (car x) 3)
            (rplaca x 3)))
    --> (3 3)

That would be the only reason I could imagine why the definition of
rplaca in emacs lisp has been thus changed, probably because when emacs
lisp was designed, lispers where too influenced by scheme and its bad
habit of renaming classic function and being incompatible with legacy
for no good reason, in general.


The gotchas between emacs lisp and Common Lisp are too numerous to make
a list.  And imagine that before Common Lisp, you had to deal with this
kind of problem about anytime you wanted to move a lisp program from one
machine to the other, because each machine had its own OS, with its own
specific lisp!  Happily, Common Lisp came. Unfortunately RMS didn't see
fit to follow the proceeding, and to upgrade emacs lisp to Common Lisp
when it was finally completed.

I prefer to concentrate on what's common between Common Lisp and emacs
lisp:

http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/small-cl-pgms/intersection-r5rs-common-lisp-emacs-lisp/
http://www.informatimago.com/develop/lisp/com/informatimago/small-cl-pgms/intersection-r5rs-common-lisp-emacs-lisp/intersection-cl-el-r5rs.lisp


-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
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