in reply to the summary: nice.. some day I'll have to look into the bellow of the beast. Arc3F no longer has lists build up from cons?, or lists are build from cons which are a special kind of lists.
Well, I prefer to think of cons-as-lists as one implementation of lists. It's possible to define alternative implementations of lists; all that is necessary is to define the overloads for 'car, 'cdr, 'scanner, and 'unscan. With generic functions in Arc-F, that is enough to iterate, cut, search, filter, join, map, and more on any list, regardless of whether it's made of 'cons cells or 'lazy-scanner objects.