Re: Why don't people like lisp?

Jeff Barnett <jbb@notatt.com> writes:

In Common Lisp, symbolic constants were defined for the IEEE plus and
minus infinities. I don't recall the syntax at the moment but do
remember they were quite useful in making certain codes easier to read
and understand.

That's pretty horrendous either way (-99999 or -INF) .  Better to return
an empty list in the event that that the input is empty.  Also if I
understand the intention of that function, you really have to make two
passes through the list, which is simpler anyway.