RE: Sweeter Emacs Lisp

[Drew Adams]

>    [...] but AFAICS, car and cdr are way more used than first and
>    rest... the latter were half-hearted attempts at making lisp
>    "friendly" but have never seemed to have gotten much traction;
>    whether they're better is at best, arguable...
> 
> CAR and CDR are cool because they align vertically nicely.

Not to mention the coolness of cadr, cdar, caar, cddr, and all the
rest (Common Lisp, at least).  Their names tell you what they do,
no matter how complex the operation (e.g. cdaadr).

That's not a reason not to define meaningfully named access macros
for particular contexts.  And it's not a reason not to allow `first'
etc. macros or `nth', `elt', `aref' etc. functions.

It's just to point out a very useful naming pattern that, once one
gets used to it, is beyond compare.