Personally, I think the name "cons*" is better because the function does a whole bunch of cons's (and "whole bunch of" is one common meaning of "*").
Robby On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Eli Barzilay<e...@barzilay.org> wrote: > 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 > _________________________________________________ For list-related administrative tasks: http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-dev
