On Jul 12, Paulo J. Matos wrote: > On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 10:43 -0400, Carl Eastlund wrote: > > We call it list*. > > > > Missed that... thanks! > However, can't understand why list* when cons* seems a better name.
1. `list*' is older IME -- it had been part of mzscheme and every other scheme implementation I worked with, and it is "even" part of CL. I have never seen `cons*' before srfi-1. 2. You can see this raised on the very first message to the srfi-1 list, http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-1/mail-archive/msg00000.html with a suggestion to include both since they are "equally popular". At the time, only `list*' was suggested. Later, Olin simply said "General consensus is that CONS* is a better name. I have changed the name accordingly". That's in http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-1/mail-archive/msg00033.html . 3. IMO `list*' works much better -- and sets a nice precedent for `append*' and `string-append*' which we have now. (The first is extremely useful, and was suggested by Ryan.) `cons*' does not provide the same precedent. 4. In fact, the only justification I see for `cons*' is that you can write bad things like (cons* 1 2) and (cons* 1 2 3 4 5). This is also the explanation in that first message to the srfi list ("while CONS* may suggest that the result could be an improper list"). -- ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x))) Eli Barzilay: http://barzilay.org/ Maze is Life! _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
