Land of Lisp

Chapter 7. Going Beyond Basic Lists

In this chapter, we’ll go beyond basic list concepts. We’ll talk about special kinds of lists, and we’ll write a game that will take list manipulation to a new level.

Exotic Lists

As you learned in Chapter 3, lists in Lisp are built out of cons cells—small data structures that allow you to link together two pieces of data. The right slot in the last cons cell in a list should contain a nil.

By stringing together several cons cells, you can create a list of any length. For instance, this is how we would use cons cells to create a list of the numbers 1, 2, and 3:

(cons 1 (cons 2 (cons 3 nil)))

Since it’s so cumbersome ...