[ENH] Lispy list functions

Jesse Welton jwelton at pacific.mps.ohio-state.edu
Tue Sep 14 13:59:43 UTC 1999


Bert Freudenberg wrote:
> 
> To clarify: My point was to only use Collections if this is necessary,
> namely if you have 2 or more elements. 
> 
> I know there are some limitations like you can't have Arrays or nil as
> last element of a list, but I think that's no problem here.

It's okay as a design decision to save on the overhead of collections
where unnecessary, but this restriction is a large enough deviation
from Lisp-like lists that I would no longer call them truly Lispy.
"Lispy" lists should be able to handle nesting in all positions.

Admittedly, I can't think of any examples where this would be really
needed (such as association lists) that aren't superceded by Smalltalk
classes (such as Dictionary).  And if I needed to throw together my
own nested-list-like data structure, I'd probably make a special class
for it, too.  But if I wanted to use a Lispy list to throw it
together, I wouldn't want to be limited in what I can put in the last
place.

-Jesse





More information about the Squeak-dev mailing list