Hi,
On a recent consideration of the design of Scheme, a question comes to my mind: Why do we have both list and dotted-list, given that the former is just a special case (terminated by nil) of the latter? Can we simply live with the latter? I see it is fairly easy to write common list procedures, like `length', `map', `append' etc that could handle dotted-list very well, with the predicate `pair?'. Is there some special consideration for the 'terminating a list by nil' convention? (I see one maybe from the recursive data structure view, but it does not convince me.) If 'terminating a list by nil' is considered good, can we live without `dot', having `cons' build a true list (conforming to the definition of list in recursive data structure)? In other words, is it a good idea to have everything be a list or dotted-list? -- DAI Yi (代 毅)
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