(this essay is originally written around 2008) The Cons Business The other fundamental problem in the language is its cons cells as its list construction primitive. Lisp at core is based on functional programing on lists. This is a powerful paradigm. However, for historical reasons, lisp's list is based on the hardware concept of “cons” cell. From a mathematical, functional, API point of view, what this means is that lisp's “list” is limited to a max of 2 elements. If you want a longer list, you...