Re: Java and Python have just discovered "record" type finally after 40 years.

["Jeffrey R.Carter" <spam.jrcarter.not@spam.acm.org.not>]

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