list-length

[Jonathan A Rees <JAR @ MIT-MC>]

    Date: Fri, 4 Jan 85 15:50:17 est
    From: Will Clinger <willc%indiana.csnet at csnet-relay.arpa>

    Pardon me, but I am not certain whether your recent message (LIST-APPEND,
    LIST-REVERSE, LIST-SORT, LIST-MAPCAR, ...) was in support of or in derision
    of the proposal that the operations on lists be prefixed by LIST- .

Neither, really.  The intent of the message was to ask "where do you
draw the line?".  E.g.  APPEND / STRING-APPEND have the same problem that
LENGTH / STRING-LENGTH do.  If you're not careful you end up putting
data type prefixes on everything (as you might have to in a strongly typed
language without unions, like PASCAL) or nothing (as in a fully generic
language like Smalltalk).  What policy should we adopt?