Does a Lisp or Scheme cons bear any similarities or theoretical kinship to a dot product? In the Lisp family (cons 1 2) produces (1 . 2) which looks a lot like a dot product. Just coincidence?

Does a Lisp or Scheme cons bear any similarities or theoretical kinship to a dot product? In the Lisp family (cons 1 2) produces (1 . 2) which looks a lot like a dot product. Just coincidence?

• scheme
• lisp
• dot-product
• cons

• 1 Dot product has a generalization as an inner product - which is a set of axioms for a binary function on a vector space. I don't see similarity. It's a coincidence. Cons simply maps two lisp values to a pair of those value cons: A x B -> A x B. Haskell cons is slightly stricter, but also insightful: cons : a -> [a] -> [a]. – Justin Meiners Commented Feb 1 at 5:34
• 1 It is a convention for printing. The pair doesn't actually look like anything at all. (If you evaluate (+ 1 1), you get 2, which looks like a swan. Coincidence?) – molbdnilo Commented Feb 1 at 9:22

1 Answer 1

No, there's no relationship. Dot product is an operation that combines two matrixes. cons creates a container object that holds references to the two argument objects.

The fact that they both use . in their notation is purely coincidence.