Talk:List (computing)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[edit] Changes

Changes I made:

• Lists are not necessary allowed to be of heterogenous type, though the traditional Lisp lists of course are. Lists in Standard ML, for example, must be of a specific type (e.g. int list, or string list).
• The traditional way of implementing lists, originating with Lisp, is using cons cells: each list element has a "car" field containing the value, and a "cdr" field pointing to the next element (or NULL/null/nil/etc. for the last element). This turns into a linked list for non-nested lists, or a tree for nested lists. Lists can be implemented with arrays, but this isn't standard (or common, afaik).

--Delirium 03:47 6 Jul 2003 (UTC)

[edit] Cleanup

I removed the October 2005 cleanup tag as there is no discussion here of what needs improvement. Hyacinth 11:20, 10 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] page should be renamed to say "List (Lisp)" not "List (computing)

This is the structure for lists used by the Lisp programming language. Also, while easy to build in RAM, it's not the greatest structure, due to its asymmetry and more (I could argue Lisp speaks lists with a lisp). Other programming languages generally represent & construct lists differently, and often more symmetrically, as via arrays. Even (X)HTML (a very popular part of computing) doesn't use such structures (cons-cells) externally to construct its lists (OL & UL plus the other XML attributes), nor I really doubt uses them internally in any implementation. So rename the title of this page. In its present form, it gives a mis-impression that Computer Science represents Lists this way and THINKS of lists this way, when, more often than not, it doesn't. --MBParker (talk) 01:15, 4 January 2008 (UTC) (MIT CS grad)