Copyright © 2003-2005, Peter Seibel

13. Beyond Lists: Other Uses for Cons Cells

As you saw in the previous chapter, the list data type is an illusion created by a set of functions that manipulate cons cells. Common Lisp also provides functions that let you treat data structures built out of cons cells as trees, sets, and lookup tables. In this chapter I’ll give you a quick tour of some of these other data structures and the functions for manipulating them. As with the list-manipulation functions, many of these functions will be useful when you start writing more complicated macros and need to manipulate Lisp code as data.