HLL and misa...

[Rainer Blome]

could we somehow settle on a central (no flaming, please ;) hub for the
discussion?  i somewhat lost track of who has got or will get what message.
garth, to join tunes, just send a message with
"subscribe tunes Garth Yourlastname" in the
body to listman@ens.fr.

garth wrote:
> my point was that on the abtract level s-exp are very useful.  never
> mind the fact taht it's in a linked-list which has cars and cdrs and
> all that nonsense.
yup.  the command language for gwm (generic window manager) did  exactly
that:  implemented sexpressions as vectors (i think even lists were
vectors).  they just didn't need the genericity of linked lists.

a few months ago, i stopped using `cons'.
  o i use `pair' (which is an alias for `cons'), when i mean a cons (which
    is a pair of pointers, after all).  when i want to build a binary tree,
    for example.
  o and i use `prepend', when i want to prepend an element to a list.  that
    makes the code independent of the implementation of lists.
    (i've always tried to use first and rest instead of car and cdr.  even
    my lisp-teacher had trouble justifying these names.  he said `contents
    of address register' and `contents of decrement (descent?) register' is
    that right?)

hmm, gotta go, more later !? ...

rainer