As names, car and cdr are great: short, and just the right visual distance apart. The only argument against them is that they're not mnemonic. But this is a weak argument.
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(a) More mnemonic names tend to be over-specific (not all cdrs are tails), and (b) after a week of using Lisp, car and cdr mean the two halves of a cons cell, and languages should be designed for people who've used them for more than a week.
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Why did you go with “pair” instead of “cons” in bel?
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Because cons is not the primitive that makes them. That's join. It would have been weird for join to make things with the name of a function built on top of it. So I could use cons for the name of the function or the name of the type, but not both, and I chose the former.
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It's easy to come up with something better, e.g. glc/grc for get left/right of cell. I've used car/cdr for years (and the Tezos VM even has them as opcodes) and I still find myself thinking: "cdr, d comme droite".
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glc/glr are not as pronounceable as car/cdr
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Is it necessarily true that you can't use Lisp for more than a week without being aware of how it's implemented? And if yes, is this a good thing? The fact that Lisp has cons cells as a basic data type seems like exactly the sort of implementation detail which shouldn't matter.
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It sounds like you may be conflating conses and lists. If conses were only used for lists, then it would be an implementation detail that they were made of pairs. But conses aren't only used for lists.
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Most likely an accident, but the mix-n-match of a’s and d’s (as in “cadar” = (car (cdr (car …))) ) still improves program brevity quite a bit when working a lot with lists in ways that are hard to recover when using more proper names.
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This is the flaw for something like spacemacs, trying to push everything to mnemonics. Learning a new system or language should reduce complexity (with new words with unique meaning, like car/cdr) not increase it by requiring on-the-fly composition (most software)
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I wonder if these names are too general. The meaning seems different based on the data structure. Clojure does something interesting: first, second, and rest functions cover car and cdr There is cons for lists, but different constructors for other types
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Wheeo... I followed through to the Wikipedia pages on cons cells and algebraic datatypes: Voila there's a ref to the HOPE "programming language". Nostalgia rush running through my vains. The derivative icHope was my introduction to abstract datatypes at
@unirostock
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