Modifying Lists¶

The distinction between filtering/searching lists and modifying them is somewhat blurred, for reasons I will discuss more closely in a minute. You may notice that also the official reference pages about list modification and searching mix entries in a somewhat arbitrary way.

I will not cover all procedures on this page but try to explain the basic behaviour. But I strongly recommend you visit the two reference pages and familiarize yourself with what is available.

Changing a Single List Element¶

list-set! is the corresponding procedure to list-ref:

(list-set! <list> <index> <new-value>)

changes the element addressed by the (zero-based) index argument to the new value. The trailing ! in the name indicates (by convention) that list-set! actually modifies the list instead of returning a copy. The expression evalulates to the new value.

guile> (define a '(1 2 3 4 5))
guile> (list-set! a 1 'b)
b
guile> a
(1 b 3 4 5)

You can see that if the list is bound to a variable the change is also persistent.

Changing the Remainder of a List¶

With list-cdr-set! you can change the n-th cdr of a list to something else, usually another list.

guile> (define a '(1 2 3))
guile> (define b '(4 5 6))
guile> (list-cdr-set! a 1 b)
(4 5 6)
guile> a
(1 2 4 5 6)

What does happen here exactly? The procedure determines the list element at position 1, which is the second element, 2. Then it sets the cdr of this element to the list b, effectively appending the second list to the list head of the first.

The same list could equally have been constructed with

guile> (append (list-head a 2) b)
(1 2 4 5 6)

with the difference that the latter would have returned a new list.