Prepend a value to a list.

Constructs a list with the value car prepended to the front of the list cdr.

This is just a shorthand for list.cons(item), but I find it much easier to read cons(1, cons(2, CatList::new())) than CatList::new().cons(2).cons(1), given that the resulting list will be [1, 2].

Examples

assert_eq!(
  cons(1, cons(2, cons(3, CatList::new()))),
  catlist![1, 2, 3]
);

Historical Anecdote

The words car and cdr come from Lisp, and were the original names of the functions to get the left and the right hands of a cons cell, respectively. Cons cells in Lisp were simply containers for two values: the car and the cdr (pronounced 'cudder'), and, Lisp being an untyped language, had no restrictions on cons cells forming proper lists, but this is how they were most commonly used: forming singly linked lists by having the left hand side contain a value, and the right hand side a pointer to the rest of the list.

cons is short for 'construct', which is the easy one. car means 'contents of address register' and cdr means 'contents of decrement register.' These were the registers on the CPU of the IBM 704 computer (on which Lisp was originally implemented) used to hold the respective values.

Lisp also commonly provided pre-composed sequences of the car and cdr functions, such as cadr, the car of the cdr, ie. the second element of a list, and cddr, the list with the two first elements dropped. Pronunciation goes like this: cadr is, obviously, 'cadder', while cddr is 'cududder', and caddr (the car of the cdr of the cdr) is 'cadudder'. It can get a little subtle for the untrained ear.