April 2005
Beginner to intermediate
528 pages
16h 20m
English
Content preview from Practical Common Lisp
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
Start your free trial
CHAPTER 13Beyond Lists: Other Usesfor Cons Cells
As you saw in the previous chapter, the list data type is an illusion created by a set of functions that manipulate cons cells. Common Lisp also provides functions that let you treat data structures built out of cons cells as trees, sets, and lookup tables. In this chapter I'll give you a quick tour of some of these other data structures and the functions for manipulating them. As with the list-manipulation functions, many of these functions will be useful when you start writing more complicated macros and need to manipulate Lisp code as data.
Trees
Treating structures built from cons cells as trees is just about as natural as treating them as lists. What is a list of lists, after all, but another ...