[flavio81]

> In my humble opinion Common Lisp is the classic example of the kitchen sink syndrome, where many pieces taken from various dialects were put together in a hurry.

Can you give a particular example?

I have read many times about people speaking about the amount of "cruft" that was left into Common Lisp, but frankly i've yet to find any cruft. Some people use as an example the fact that there is "CAR " and "CDR", but in this particular topic:

1) you could use "first" and "rest" if you wnat, instead of "car" and "cdr" 2) Using "car" and "cdr" is good because it shows that you are explicitely wanting to modify cons cells; 3) "car" and "cdr" is to Lisp what "*" is to C; that is, part of the charm!!

[lngnmn]

Its mostly about inconsistent naming, order of arguments and standard idioms. Obviously most of these are historical artifacts, like nconc and friends or the primitives for working with hash-tables.

Car and cdr are small miracles because they give us of caddr or caadr and friends. It is beautiful accident which should be appreciated and preserved.

[kbp]

> Its mostly about inconsistent naming, order of arguments

Do you have some examples of inconsistent order of arguments? I'm not really doubting you, I just can't think of any examples.

[lispm]

One of the goals of Common Lisp was backwarts compatibility. The stuff from McCarthy's Lisp is mostly present in Maclisp, Zetalisp and Common Lisp. That's why they are Lisp languages. Every language existing for a longer period of time accumulates different design approaches. A language purist may complain, but a programmer will get his stuff ported and will get work done.