In article <·············@nhplace.com>,
Kent M Pitman <······@nhplace.com> wrote:
> If the atom division is something that bugs you a lot, one way to
> address it is never to use atom and always to use the type CONS or the
> function CONSP (negated, of course) in situations where you want this
> distinction.
If the function CONSP had existed in early versions of Lisp, the problem
I decribed in my earlier reply might not have arisen. But early Lisp
implementations were frugal, due to memory constraints, so having both
ATOM and CONSP would have been unnecessarily redundant. Unfortunately,
the one they went with was ATOM, so now we're stuck with the notion that
everything that isn't a cons is an atom, even though many of them are
not atomic.
--
Barry Margolin, ······@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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