[PD] a story for Lists

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Wed, 8 Apr 2009, IOhannes m zmoelnig wrote:

> somehow functional languages like lisp manage to do well with lists and 
> dealing the head of a list (selector) in various special ways without 
> making the head be different from the elements of the tail.

Lists in LISP have little to do with Pd's lists.

LISP always guaranteed the CONS operation to take O(1) time and O(1) 
space. In Pd, this is impossible to do with messages. Pd messages look 
like LISP's vectors instead (except Pd messages are stack-allocated).

On top of that, LISP's values have Pd's atoms as their closest equivalent, 
and from that perspective, Pd doesn't have any lists (nor vectors), but 
that's only a symptom of having implemented messages before lists and 
having then implemented lists using messages.

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| Mathieu Bouchard - tél:+1.514.383.3801, Montréal, Québec