Car and cdr (Re: Python syntax in Lisp and Scheme)

[Christos TZOTZIOY Georgiou]

On 16 Oct 2003 16:37:01 +0200, rumours say that Pascal Bourguignon
<spam at thalassa.informatimago.com> might have written:

>> Yes, but noone (noone at all) refers to that meaning anymore. It's a
>> historical accident that doesn't really matter anymore when developing
>> code.
>
>Indeed.  Had the first lisp been  programmed on a 680x0, we would have
>d0 and d1 instead of car and  cdr, or worse, had it been done on 8086,
>we would have ax and bx...

Perhaps on 680x0 they would be ca0 and cd0, or ca0r and cd0r.  AFAIK car
stands for contents of address register and cdr for contents of contents
of data register.  So, picking register 0 out of 8 (7 if you exclude a7
/ sp) address registers and register 0 out of 8 data registers is just a
choice on this hypothetical subject.

However, I have a suspicion that the "correct" names would be ca0r and
c(a0)r ...
-- 
TZOTZIOY, I speak England very best,
Ils sont fous ces Redmontains! --Harddix