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Programming in Emacs Lisp

7. car, cdr, cons: Fundamental Functions

In Lisp, car, cdr, and cons are fundamental functions. The cons function is used to construct lists, and the car and cdr functions are used to take them apart.

In the walk through of the copy-region-as-kill function, we will see cons as well as two variants on cdr, namely, setcdr and nthcdr. (See section 8.5 copy-region-as-kill.)

Strange Names		An historical aside: why the strange names?
7.1 car and cdr		Functions for extracting part of a list.
7.2 cons		Constructing a list.
7.3 nthcdr		Calling cdr repeatedly.
7.4 nth
7.5 setcar		Changing the first element of a list.
7.6 setcdr		Changing the rest of a list.
7.7 Exercise