if the else short form

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message
<45368e8d-3b4f-4380-974d-bf9cd5d68d09 at w9g2000prc.googlegroups.com>, 
NevilleDNZ wrote:

> I do ponder why (given that linked lists can easily be created in Algol68)
> useful types like LIST and DICT were left out of the standard prelude.

I guess a list type wasn’t seen as primitive enough. Besides, what would you 
call the fields—would you use the LISP-traditional names of “car” and “cdr”? 
POP-2, another language from that time, used “hd” and “tl”, but these were 
actually functions that looked for fields named “front” and “back”, and 
interpreted their values in special ways. This allowed for “lazy 
evaluation”, which meant that list elements only took up storage when they 
were actually referenced.

As for DICT, I think table lookups were still a sufficiently novel concept 
for people to disagree on how they should best be implemented.