eintr: car & cdr
7.1 ‘car’ and ‘cdr’
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The CAR of a list is, quite simply, the first item in the list. Thus
the CAR of the list ‘(rose violet daisy buttercup)’ is ‘rose’.
If you are reading this in Info in GNU Emacs, you can see this by
evaluating the following:
(car '(rose violet daisy buttercup))
After evaluating the expression, ‘rose’ will appear in the echo area.
Clearly, a more reasonable name for the ‘car’ function would be
‘first’ and this is often suggested.
‘car’ does not remove the first item from the list; it only reports
what it is. After ‘car’ has been applied to a list, the list is still
the same as it was. In the jargon, ‘car’ is “non-destructive”. This
feature turns out to be important.
The CDR of a list is the rest of the list, that is, the ‘cdr’
function returns the part of the list that follows the first item.
Thus, while the CAR of the list ‘'(rose violet daisy buttercup)’ is
‘rose’, the rest of the list, the value returned by the ‘cdr’ function,
is ‘(violet daisy buttercup)’.
You can see this by evaluating the following in the usual way:
(cdr '(rose violet daisy buttercup))
When you evaluate this, ‘(violet daisy buttercup)’ will appear in the
echo area.
Like ‘car’, ‘cdr’ does not remove any elements from the list—it just
returns a report of what the second and subsequent elements are.
Incidentally, in the example, the list of flowers is quoted. If it
were not, the Lisp interpreter would try to evaluate the list by calling
‘rose’ as a function. In this example, we do not want to do that.
Clearly, a more reasonable name for ‘cdr’ would be ‘rest’.
(There is a lesson here: when you name new functions, consider very
carefully what you are doing, since you may be stuck with the names for
far longer than you expect. The reason this document perpetuates these
names is that the Emacs Lisp source code uses them, and if I did not use
them, you would have a hard time reading the code; but do, please, try
to avoid using these terms yourself. The people who come after you will
be grateful to you.)
When ‘car’ and ‘cdr’ are applied to a list made up of symbols, such
as the list ‘(pine fir oak maple)’, the element of the list returned by
the function ‘car’ is the symbol ‘pine’ without any parentheses around
it. ‘pine’ is the first element in the list. However, the CDR of the
list is a list itself, ‘(fir oak maple)’, as you can see by evaluating
the following expressions in the usual way:
(car '(pine fir oak maple))
(cdr '(pine fir oak maple))
On the other hand, in a list of lists, the first element is itself a
list. ‘car’ returns this first element as a list. For example, the
following list contains three sub-lists, a list of carnivores, a list of
herbivores and a list of sea mammals:
(car '((lion tiger cheetah)
(gazelle antelope zebra)
(whale dolphin seal)))
In this example, the first element or CAR of the list is the list of
carnivores, ‘(lion tiger cheetah)’, and the rest of the list is
‘((gazelle antelope zebra) (whale dolphin seal))’.
(cdr '((lion tiger cheetah)
(gazelle antelope zebra)
(whale dolphin seal)))
It is worth saying again that ‘car’ and ‘cdr’ are
non-destructive—that is, they do not modify or change lists to which
they are applied. This is very important for how they are used.
Also, in the first chapter, in the discussion about atoms, I said
that in Lisp, certain kinds of atom, such as an array, can be separated
into parts; but the mechanism for doing this is different from the
mechanism for splitting a list. As far as Lisp is concerned, the atoms
of a list are unsplittable. (
Lisp Atoms.) The ‘car’ and ‘cdr’
functions are used for splitting lists and are considered fundamental to
Lisp. Since they cannot split or gain access to the parts of an array,
an array is considered an atom. Conversely, the other fundamental
function, ‘cons’, can put together or construct a list, but not an
array. (Arrays are handled by array-specific functions. Arrays
(elisp)Arrays.)
Info Catalog
eintr: Strange Names
eintr: car cdr & cons
eintr: cons