Re: Return

[Stefan Monnier]

> If you take a look at Elisp programs, you'll notice that in practice it
> is primarily used as an imperative language, not a functional language
> (that is: the focus is on executing actions, not on constructing
> values).  It doesn't really help that the fundamental data structure,
> the list, is not an abstract data type but realised via a rather
> low-level pointer to a statically allocated pair of user-accessible
> values, cutting right through the idea of "functional programming" where
> the output is a mathematic function/transformation of the input.

Actually, I think that the cons cells are relatively harmless in this
regard (setcar/setcdr are not used that often, tho maybe slightly more
so via delq and friends) compared to the blow incurred by the
inefficiency of Elisp recursion.


        Stefan