Comment by brudgers
8 years ago
Head and tail make more sense in ML because data gets the stream abstraction. The semantics of car/cdr make sense in the context of Von Neumann memory. It's no accident that car/cdr came from machine code...and that's what Lisp was mostly competing with.
I don't see how head and tail make less sense as names for generic elements of a pair than abbreviations derived from idiosyncrasies of a long-dead computer from the 1950s.
Sorry for not being clear. Specific terms make more or less sense depending on the context for which a language was designed. The ML family of languages comes out of telecom where the stream abstraction expresses a primary aspect of the principle input. Production versions of Lisp developed as a substitute for machine code. Even today, Common Lisp is useful for abstracting over operations best understood in terms of places where values mutate. Functional programming ideology aside, Common Lisp provides a good tool for "close to the metal thinking". It's not as close as C. It's closer than Java on top of the JVM.
In ML, head/tail are a bit of training wheels anyway. Most interesting ML code relies on [x1::x2::x3::[y::ys]] pattern matching. Erlang (another telecom language but without ML's academic pedigree) foregos a formal head/tail and just relies on idiomatic {H|T} pattern matching. In ML head/tail make it easier to teach students the concept of car/cdr, but not much else.