12 Oct 2022

#+title: Art of Lisp questions

What’s that

I’m reading a book, I’m taking notes. Here will be notes for the book “Art of Lisp Programing”

What is Art of Lisp Programming

A 1987 book by Robin Jones and Ian Stewart, seems to be quite a primitive introduction to the LISP. Still, it’s written pretty well, illustrated with pictures from Alice in Wonderland and is, well, interesting! Also authors are from ZX Spectrum clique, that is +100500 to their nerdiness.

Try simple things

car/cdr are named so due to historical reasons, i.e. assembly mnemonics of long gone IBM 709. Let’s use head and tail instead.

(defun head (x)
 (car x))
(defun tail (x)
  (cdr x))
(- (head '(4 3 2 1)) (head (tail '(4 3 2 1))))  ;; 1 is expected as (- 4 3)