[plt-dev] cons*, why not?

Personally, I think the name "cons*" is better because the function
does a whole bunch of cons's (and "whole bunch of" is one common
meaning of "*").

Robby

On Sun, Jul 12, 2009 at 10:50 AM, Eli Barzilay<eli at barzilay.org> wrote:
> On Jul 12, Paulo J. Matos wrote:
>> On Sun, 2009-07-12 at 10:43 -0400, Carl Eastlund wrote:
>> > We call it list*.
>> >
>>
>> Missed that... thanks!
>> However, can't understand why list* when cons* seems a better name.
>
> 1. `list*' is older IME -- it had been part of mzscheme and every
>   other scheme implementation I worked with, and it is "even" part of
>   CL.  I have never seen `cons*' before srfi-1.
>
> 2. You can see this raised on the very first message to the srfi-1
>   list, http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-1/mail-archive/msg00000.html
>   with a suggestion to include both since they are "equally popular".
>   At the time, only `list*' was suggested.
>
>   Later, Olin simply said "General consensus is that CONS* is a
>   better name. I have changed the name accordingly".  That's in
>   http://srfi.schemers.org/srfi-1/mail-archive/msg00033.html .
>
> 3. IMO `list*' works much better -- and sets a nice precedent for
>   `append*' and `string-append*' which we have now.  (The first is
>   extremely useful, and was suggested by Ryan.)  `cons*' does not
>   provide the same precedent.
>
> 4. In fact, the only justification I see for `cons*' is that you can
>   write bad things like (cons* 1 2) and (cons* 1 2 3 4 5).  This is
>   also the explanation in that first message to the srfi list ("while
>   CONS* may suggest that the result could be an improper list").
>
> --
>          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
>                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!
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