[plt-scheme] Convention for alists?

On Sat, Apr 02, 2005 at 09:41:57PM -0600, jekwtw wrote:
>   For list-related administrative tasks:
>   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> 
> It's not really a convention -- the two examples specify two different
> types of tables.  The first maps symbols to numbers while the second
> maps symbols to lists of numbers.

Those two sentences aren't consistent with each other, because the
second implies the existence of a convention.  There's no self-evident
reason why the second form---e.g., '((a 3) (b 4))---can't be interpreted
as mapping symbols to numbers; if you want to map to lists of numbers
instead, you could just do '((a (3)) (b (4 5))).

Richard