Re: lisp style question

[Katalin Sinkov <lispstylist@gmail.com>]

On Dec 2, 12:50 am, "Frode V. Fjeld" <fr...@netfonds.no> wrote:
> Katalin Sinkov <lispstyl...@gmail.com> writes:
> > In the {} world I would return a small table like
>
> > width   1
> > height  2
> > weight  3
>
> Typically in Lisp you'd return either a property or association list.
>
> I.e: (WIDTH 1 HEIGHT 2 WEIGHT 3) with accessor GETF,
>
> or ((WIDTH . 1) (HEIGHT . 2) (WEIGHT . 3)) with accessor ASSOC.
>
> --
> Frode V. Fjeld

Of all the four or five replies, I found yours most helpful although
brief. This is perhaps due to me being a beginner, although the
replies seem very promising and I am desirous of understanding them. I
have just read the paper by McCarthy and the micro manual.

assoc. and pair. are the most elementary of the functions, although
not primitive and used in evaluator for working the symbol table.

but beyond this, i could not understand your post.

what is an "assoc list" and "a property list" and their difference ?

what is "setf" and how to write it in terms of the elementary
functions, car/cdr/cons/quote/cond/atom/eq ?

how to conveniently costruct the list that goes with getf ?

Presently I use the emacs IDE only and restricted to elisp, though i
can (require 'cl) so what are
the correponding operation in elisp ?

what are the corresponding functions to defclass/defstruct in elisp ?
I assume people are assuming CL.

Could you comment a little on the post of Captain Obvious and Pascal
Bourguignon ?

The former has "values" and the latter has "make-volume" and colons.
How did the constructor "make-volume" come to be ?

Is it a feature in elisp ?

Thanks for your help.

Katalin