17 lines
949 B
Plaintext
17 lines
949 B
Plaintext
cdr
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/kudr/ , /kuhdr/ , vt. [from LISP] To skip past the first item from a list
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of things (generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures,
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which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its
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argument). In the form cdr down , to trace down a list of elements: Shall we
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cdr down the agenda? Usage: silly. See also loop through. Historical note:
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The instruction format of the IBM 704 that hosted the original LISP
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implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the address and decrement
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parts. The term cdr was originally Contents of Decrement part of Register.
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Similarly, car stood for Contents of Address part of Register. The cdr and
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car operations have since become bases for formation of compound metaphors
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in non-LISP contexts. GLS recalls, for example, a programming project in
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which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and
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skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.
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