List Encodings
An encoding of (immutable) lists of varying length must define a constructor for creating an empty list (nil), an operation testing whether or not a list is empty (isnil), an operation to prepend a given value to a (possibly empty) list (cons), and two operations to determine the first element and the list of the remaining elements of a nonempty list (head and tail).
Read more about this topic: Church Encoding
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—Janet Frame (b. 1924)