From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.6 (2021-04-09) on ip-172-31-65-14.ec2.internal X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-3.2 required=3.0 tests=BAYES_00,NICE_REPLY_A, T_SCC_BODY_TEXT_LINE autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.6 Path: eternal-september.org!news.eternal-september.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail From: "Jeffrey R.Carter" Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Java and Python have just discovered "record" type finally after 40 years. Date: Mon, 15 May 2023 12:44:13 +0200 Organization: A noiseless patient Spider Message-ID: References: <878rdrrlly.fsf@bsb.me.uk> <87353ys8is.fsf@bsb.me.uk> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Injection-Date: Mon, 15 May 2023 10:44:14 -0000 (UTC) Injection-Info: dont-email.me; posting-host="cc62feb47797be3c2e3beb23a2d88995"; logging-data="3194746"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@eternal-september.org"; posting-account="U2FsdGVkX1+um9htoFxixvEQMWiyneGl7eoKlUS9z50=" User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:102.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/102.10.0 Cancel-Lock: sha1:9P96FEcORNZdu6E1rabvzjjYGgM= Content-Language: en-US In-Reply-To: <87353ys8is.fsf@bsb.me.uk> Xref: news.eternal-september.org comp.lang.ada:65240 List-Id: On 2023-05-15 03:11, Ben Bacarisse wrote: > > Do you still have it? Does is discuss association lists? I'd call them > a normal part of LISP and it would be odd to force the associations to > be lists rather than pairs. Does Siklóssy imply that an ASSOC list is a > list of lists of length 2, or does he not discuss them until the very > end? The Function ASSOC is discussed in Chapter 9 as an auxiliary function used by EVAL (Chapter 9 discusses the working of EVAL). It says ASSOC finds the value of a variable in the ALIST. The ALIST is a list of sublists of two SEXes each of the form (variable value-of-the-variable). In a footnote he notes that the ALIST could be a list of dotted pairs, which are defined in the next chapter. I never did much with LISP after learning it, and never looked at any other textbooks, so he might have an idiosyncratic approach. Seems rather OT for c.l.a. -- Jeff Carter "Mixtures of similar characters (letter O and digit 0, letter I and digit 1, etc.) are unsafe, as are long identifiers that differ only at the end." Elements of Programming Style 187