'list*' returns not a list

@AndyFingerhut - Thanks for the reminder. Signed, sealed, delivered.

To Andy Sheldon, author of patch list-star-docstring.diff: Clojure only accepts patches written by those who have signed a contributor agreement. If you were interested in doing that, details on how are here: http://clojure.org/contributing

I bump into this every once in a while and it bothers my pedantic side.

I think it's too late to change the implementation of `list*`. There's a risk of breaking existing code (dealing with lazy-seqs, etc.) It would be good to change the doc string to say it returns a seq, not a list.

But the real issue is the name of the function implies that it will return a list. You could deprecate `list*` (but keep it forever for backwards compatibility.) A better name for the same implementation might be `seq*`.

Yep, these are all valid points, thanks! I see this as a question whether the list* function is a list constructor or not. If yes (and it would be possible to implement it in a satisfactory way), it should probably return a list.

We could avoid building a new list by sth like:

(btw, 'vec' also creates a new vector even when the argument itself is a vector)

The contract of next seems to be to return a seq, not a list - its docstring reads: "Returns a seq of the items after the first. Calls seq on its argument. If there are no more items, returns nil."

Btw, in some Lisp/Scheme impls I checked, cons seems to be a list as well. E.g. in CLisp (and similar in Guile and Racket):

I'm in favour of the "list" -> "seq" tweak to the docstring though, assuming impl remains unchanged.