From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,842accb6a7d76669 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-11-09 19:07:15 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!newshub2.home.com!news.home.com!news1.denver1.co.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail Message-ID: <3BEC9966.7030507@telepath.com> From: Ted Dennison User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011011 X-Accept-Language: en-us MIME-Version: 1.0 Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: List container strawman 1.1 References: <9s941i$11mrei$3@ID-25716.news.dfncis.de> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Date: Sat, 10 Nov 2001 03:07:15 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.10.28.160 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.denver1.co.home.com 1005361635 24.10.28.160 (Fri, 09 Nov 2001 19:07:15 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 09 Nov 2001 19:07:15 PST Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:16188 Date: 2001-11-10T03:07:15+00:00 List-Id: Stephen Leake wrote: > "Ada", the language, does _not_ define the term "singleton". Neither > does any other programming language that I am aware of. Common Lisp does (or at least its spec does). See http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/Body/glo_s.html#singleton . For the HTML-impaired, it reads: singleton adj. (of a sequence) having only one element. ``(list 'hello) returns a singleton list.'' Since Lisp was built around List processing, I think its reasonable to accept their terminology in these matters. In fact, my initial name for this routine was simply the full spelling (de-abbreviating?) of Lisp's "CONS", which in the Lisp world is both the name of the list construction routine, and the general term people use to describe the creation of a list. I'm not willing to go so far as to use CONS, CAR, and CDR though. :-) Perhaps in this vein, we should just do the Lisp-like thing, and create a null list which folks would have to "&" to their element to create a singleton list. :-)