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5 points by sjs 6163 days ago | link | parent

Multiple dots pass multiple params to the initial function. To chain you have to group w/ parens.

  arc> (= l '(1 2 (3 4) 5))
  (1 2 (3 4) 5)
  arc> l.2.1
  (3 4)
  arc> (l.2 1)
  4
That 2nd last one translates to (l 2 1), which as you found acts like (l 2).


3 points by mattjones 6163 days ago | link

Yep, thanks. It would be cool if there were an abbreviation for that, since it's fairly common. Eg l.2%1 (% randomly chosen) => ((l 2) 1). Some may say that goes too far toward a parentheses alternative for all sorts of things, but on the other hand data structure access is one of the clumsier parts of Lisp.

The present semantics of . make sense though.

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