If you want to get a feel for Arc, I recommend either reading or skimming the tutorial: http://ycombinator.com/arc/tut.txt . It covers the basics of Arc and its idioms.
I have three objections to (push obj lst -1), however. First, it's not pushing (since that only refers to the top of the list). Second, the last argument is meaningless: -1? Why that? Can I do (push obj lst 2)? (push obj lst -4)? And third, pushing on the end can't be as efficient: lists don't know their last element. If we push 'a onto '(b c d), we create a list whose car is 'a and whose cdr is '(b c d); if we shove 'a onto the end of '(b c d), we have to iterate until we find the element whose car is 'd and whose cdr is nil, and then set its cdr to '(a). That will take more time, and there's no way around that, so it's not fast, per se.
Don't ask me how Lutz did it. (Maybe he keeps a pointer to the end of the list?) I think that lists in NewLisp aren't quite the same as lists in Common Lisp. Lutz wrote:
The concept of a 'cons cell' is about details of early LISP
implementations (CPU registers, etc). newLISP also has a basic cell
structure which can be linked to a list but has no concept of a dotted
pair. When have you last seen a dotted pair used in a real world
program? newLISP has 'cons' but it works differently,
By the way, it would be nice if Arc let you get the last element with -1, as NewLisp does:
arc> ('(2 3 4) -1)
Error: "list-ref: expects type <non-negative exact
integer> as 2nd argument, given: -1;
other arguments were: (2 3 4 . nil)"
Huh. That (in my humble opinion) is a terribly misnamed function (push already has a specific meaning; what about ins, for insert, which is what it actually does?), but certainly a very useful one.
I'd be curious to see what (time (push 8 x 4)) looks like: is that also constant-time? What sort of data structure is newLISP using, if not a linked list? Linked list + end pointer, perhaps--but wouldn't that break on a push? Ah well. I (unfortunately) don't really have time to construct an in-depth analysis, but I'm still curious.
I'm not sure why the Anarki won't let you do ('(2 3 4) -1); it would indeed be useful. Mayhap there are efficiency concerns? Negative indexing works in cut.
Ruby has the opposite problem from conventional Lisp: it appends quickly, but prepends slowly:
t = Time.now; a=[2]; 99_000.times{ a.push( 8 ) }; p Time.now - t
0.14
==>nil
t = Time.now; a=[2]; 99_000.times{ a.unshift( 8 ) }; p Time.now - t
70.902
==>nil
t = Time.now; a=[0,1,2,3,4]; 99_000.times{ a.insert(2, 8) }; p Time.now - t
73.346
That's 73 seconds! NewLisp can insert in a list 1800 times as fast as Ruby can!
Right. In Ruby, pushing, unshifting, and spliceing are all different operations, as they should be. Meaningful names are important.
It's not quite as fast to insert in the middle, but much faster than it should be. This would, to me, imply that newLISP isn't even using linked lists at all, but is instead using some form of array, which is decidedly unLispy. If that is the case (if, I say), then of course this will only work with "one reference only", as you can't construct lists which share cdrs; "one reference only" being an awful idea, I would consider the speed a fair tradeoff.
Have you never seen a good implementation of singly-linked lists? Because accessing the last element is a relatively common operation, a decent implementation will keep a pointer to the last element. Because it's singly-linked, the last element is the only one that pointer is any good for, so (lst -2) is still O(n), but (lst -1) becomes O(1).
The weird thing is, I actually found this good idea in an APCS review book.
