Other Computer Languages
Many languages (particularly functional languages and languages influenced by the functional paradigm) use a singly linked list as a basic data structure, and provide primitives or functions similar to car and cdr. These are named variously first and rest, head and tail, etc. In Lisp, however, the cons cell is not used only to build linked lists but also to build pair and nested pair structures, i.e. the cdr of a cons cell need not be a list. In this case, most other languages provide different primitives as they typically distinguish pair structures from list structures either typefully or semantically. Particularly in typed languages, lists, pairs, and trees will all have different accessor functions with different type signatures: in Haskell, for example, car and cdr become fst and snd when dealing with a pair type. Exact analogs of car and cdr are thus rare in other languages.
Read more about this topic: CAR And CDR
Famous quotes containing the words computer and/or languages:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute.”
—J.G. (James Graham)