Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!ucsd!sdcsvax!ucsdhub!hp-sdd!hplabs!hplabsz!mayer
From: mayer@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM (Niels Mayer)
Newsgroups: comp.emacs
Subject: Re: alist help for an elisp beginner
Message-ID: <1601@hplabsz.HPL.HP.COM>
Date: 22 Feb 88 04:27:34 GMT
References: <276@ho7cad.ATT.COM> <MW4rYsy00WAIyc00P7@andrew.cmu.edu> <232@stylus.cme-durer.ARPA>
Reply-To: mayer@hplabsz.UUCP (Niels Mayer)
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Laboratories
Lines: 10

In article <232@stylus.cme-durer.ARPA> klm@cme-amrf.arpa (Ken Manheimer) writes:
>If you don't have some idea about the list data
>structure and its accessors and CONStructors, you ought to start
>elsewhere; however i think it's at least a little amusing how
>blatantly circular these definitions are.

But the definitions of cons, car and cdr are supposed to be implicitly
circular -- it's often easiest to think of them in terms of a
"decomposition property" that defines all three terms at once:
		x == (cons (car x) (cdr x))