car
and cdr
, and is used to construct lists.
For example, to construct the list (apples oranges pears bananas)
from the three-element list (oranges pears bananas)
, you would use cons
as follows:
(cons 'apples '(oranges pears bananas))The function
cons
always adds the new element to the beginning of the list. It must always have a list to start with, and fortunately, this can be the empty list. As an example, to construct the list (peaches)
, you would code:
(cons 'peaches ())