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7 car, cdr, cons: Fundamental Functions

In Lisp, car, cdr, and cons are fundamental functions. The cons function is used to construct lists, and the car and cdr functions are used to take them apart.

In the walk through of the copy-region-as-kill function, we will see cons as well as two variants on cdr, namely, setcdr and nthcdr. (See copy-region-as-kill.)

• Strange Names: An historical aside: why the strange names?
• car & cdr: Functions for extracting part of a list.
• cons: Constructing a list.
• nthcdr: Calling cdr repeatedly.
• nth:
• setcar: Changing the first element of a list.
• setcdr: Changing the rest of a list.
• cons Exercise: