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Variable assignment in Lisp.

Hi,

I am exploring Clisp and my previous experience is extremely limited in the LISP programming language.

My question is this :
I have a list of numbers defined by say :
(setq mylist '(34 78 5 231 873 76 43 82))

Now, for some reason I need to set the first value to 97 instead of 34
How do I do it the correct LISP way ?

If the value I want to change is the first one I can use something like :
(setq mylist (cons 97 (cdr mylist)))
But how do I do if the value I need to modify is at an arbitrary rank (for example the 39th in a long list) ?

If you are happy to destructively modify the list, then you can use setf. For example, the following would set the 39th element to be 97:

Code:

(setf (nth 39 mylist) 97)

A more functional (non-destructive) approach could copy the list recursively, ie:

Code:

(defun nreplace (n l e)

  (cond 

    ((= n 0) (cons e (cdr l)))

    (t (cons (car l) (nreplace (- n 1) (cdr l) e)))))

(nreplace 39 mylist 97)

But these are both inefficient; if you need to do this sort of thing often, perhaps you would look at using an array instead of a list.