Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!occrsh!uokmax!apple!usc!wuarchive!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!mntgfx!plogan
From: plogan@mentor.com (Patrick Logan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: re: Adding items to the end of a list.
Message-ID: <1990Sep5.155100.1264@mentor.com>
Date: 5 Sep 90 15:51:00 GMT
Organization: engr
Lines: 25


    I don't know exactly what the point of your message was. Was it meant to be a
    friendly recommendation to non-expert lisp programmers?

Yes. LISP has a reputation of being inefficient, this is historically
true but not so true of many current implementations. What is true
today is that many programmers, many who have used LISP extensively,
do very inefficient things in LISP. These are things the same
programmers would probably never do in C.

    Or what is a question of the sort `what do people do when they want to add
    to the end of a list'?

No, but that's a reasonable misinterpretation. Comments are welcome.

    ...functions like TCONC...without putting in your loop the code for keeping 
    track of the tail.

This is essentially what the "object" does in the second example in my
original message. It maintains the head and the tail abstractly, which
IMO is even better than using TCONC (which keeps the head in the car
and the tail in the cdr of a pair, in Franz?).
-- 
Patrick Logan, uunet!mntgfx!plogan
Mentor Graphics Corp. 8500 SW Creekside, Beaverton, Oregon 97005-7191