Towards a Better Understanding of CAR, CDR, CADR and the Others

The primary container type in LISP is the list. The elements of a list may also be lists, so the primary container type is technically a tree. LISP, like C, can be thought of as having a sub-language for accessing elements from objects of the primary container type. This sub-language has at its root the functions car and cdr, so before describing the sub-language in detail, lets see if we can make sense of these functions from their genesis, and then make use of that.