Re: novice: mapcan use?

Pascal Costanza <pc@xxxxxxxxx> writes:

> Furthermore, the majority of the destructive functions are defined on
> conses/lists. It's better to get the whole picture that Lisp isn't
> "just" about list processing, but also has other data structures that
> are probably more important for creating efficient programs than
> destructive functions.

I'm not clear on what observation you're making here.

Do you mean "the majority of functions that are ever called destructive
are among this set" or do you actually mean there are more ways to (sigh)
"destroy" (i.e., "modify") a cons/list than there are other data structures.

Certainly there are many destructive operations on other data structures,
and they are quite important. How many people seriously expect array
operations to be non-destructive, yet we do not call AREF by some goofy
name like AREF! nor even NAREF.

(The history of "N" for destruction is a pretty silly story itself. At
least Interlisp had the good sense to use "D".)
.

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