Re: [ELPA] New package: transient

[Richard Stallman]

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The names assoc, assq, rassoc and rassq come from old Lisp tradition.
Maclisp used them in the 1970s.  I would guess they go back to 1960.
If I had changed them in 1984 when writing Emacs Lisp, I would have
been throwing away my tradition and making Emacs strange to Lisp
hackers.

     > named logically (nth, remove, append), sometimes named after 
implementation

Those are also part of old Lisp tradition.

     > detail (car, cdr),

Those two functions are among the first Lisp functions ever defined
and named, in 1958 I think.  Along with 'cons' and 'eq'.

Lisp has a deep history and culture, and replacing the traditional names
names would be as intolerable as reforming English to phonetic
spelling.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)