Of cars and mice [was: Easy to add with push but not to the end of a list]

[tomas@tuxteam.de]

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On Tue, Nov 29, 2022 at 01:08:00PM +0100, Dr Rainer Woitok wrote:
> 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 :-)

But, but... imagine car-rac-rac-rac (yes, with hyphens!). The sound!

> 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)

IBM 704, but we disgress badly.

>                                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 :-(

Pity.

Now where are the mice?

;-)

Cheers
-- 
t

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