[Meehan: The use of "1"]

[Chris Riesbeck <Riesbeck at YALE>]

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Mail-from: ARPANET site UDEL-RELAY rcvd on Fri Jun 11 23:22:59 
Date:      11 Jun 82 16:59:09-PST (Fri)
From:      Jim Meehan <meehan.uci@UDel-Relay>
To:        riesbeck.yale at UDel-Relay
Subject:   The use of "1"
Via:  UCI; 11 Jun 82 23:16-EDT

 ... as in APPEND1 and NCONC1. These come from unimaginative programmers who
wanted a name similar to APPEND and NCONC, that's all. There was no intention
of having it mean "APPEND one element..." or anything sensible. It's a style
going back to assembly programming, where you had an "entry point" such as
SQRT, and you needed auxilary, internal labels: SQRT1, SQRT2, etc. The "best"
example I can remember from LISP.MAC is FIX which begat FIX1 which begat FIX1A,
which is the most useful of the three. 

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