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by lngnmn 3217 days ago
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.
2 comments
kbp 3216 days ago
> 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.

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lispm 3217 days ago
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.
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