Hacker News Reader

Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

nil? is a pretty big thing. Is Clojure even a Lisp if nil is not the empty list?

Edit: Jesus Christ, Clojure doesn't even have conses. Why the hell do people call this a "Lisp"?

  > (= () nil)
  false
  > (('a . 'b) . ('a . 'b))
  java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to resolve symbol: . in this context
  > (cons 'a 'b)
  java.lang.IllegalArgumentException: Don't know how to create ISeq from: clojure.lang.Symbol

View on HN

Sure, it does have cons, but your second argument wasn't a sequence. Try:

  > (cons 'a ['b])
  (a b)

  > (doc cons)
  -------------------------
  clojure.core/cons
  ([x seq])
  Returns a new seq where x is the first element and seq is the rest.

In other Lisps, a cons can be an arbitrary pair.

That's not a cons, that's a linked list. As tokenrove mentions, a cons in a Lisp is just a tuple (`cons` is the name of the type and the function constructing it). It can contain any two values.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com