drewc <dr...@rift.com> writes:
> yoel.jacob...@gmail.com wrote:
>> Drew,
>> Thanks. I'm actually reading this book and do find it readable and
>> practical. Yet, I can't read such a book from cover to cover without
>> any practice. I find that  simple daily tasks to be a good practice.

> Ah good! Practice makes perfect.
>> I just wonder regarding your recommendation against plist for
>> storing my strucutre. Practical Lisp clearly recommends Hash Tables
>> for large tables and plists/alists for small tables for efficiency
>> reasons.

> Nothing with plists per-se, as my PLINE->PLIST function returns one.
> its the use of a symbols plist that is generally frowned apon.

> A plist (property list) is simply a list of key/value pairs. An
> alist (associative list) is a list of lists whose CAR is the key and
> CDR is the value.

> For some (mostly historical) reason, you can also access the plist
> of a symbol. Each symbol carries a plist that can be accessed with
> SYMBOL-PLIST. Using the property list of a symbol is almost never
> what you want to do.. it's much easier to use a regular list, and
> leads to less confusion.