| You can still have a false value if nil evaluates to false in conditional expressions. car and cdr are not intuitive- head and tail are. If you want to compose, just reserve combinations of h and t. htth is shorter than caddar anyways. we all know cons is magnificent, but syntax support equivalent to haskell would be better. lisp cons item list
haskell item:list
Of course, function composition would need to use different syntax.
The other great way this is used in haskell is to pull apart a list in the function declaration. front_to_back (x:xs) = xs:[x]
This really shortens up code by removing a lot of car and cdr.
The problem of what to do for an empty list is easily handled in haskell with pattern matching. front_to_back [] = []
Obviously this would be harder to implement in lisp without implementing pattern matching.
But I think is is possible in lisp, but you may need a different syntax for pulling the list apart. (def front-to-back ((x|xs))
(if (x|xs) (xs:(x)) '()))
Making Qi's pattern matcher work would probably be better.Often [.. _ ..] may really just be a way to achieve partial application for a function. In that case, (map [+ 10 _] '(1 2 3))
If the meaning of [] is changed to partial applicaion, this can be shortened to (map [+ 10] '(1 2 3))
Which actually gets rid of the variable instead of changing it to _To create an actual function how about map \(x (+ 10 x)) '(1 2 3)
use _ abbreviation map \(+ 10 _) '(1 2 3)
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