Question 9: Lists: C and Lisp [6]

In assignment 4 we considered implementing lisp-like lists in C, with functions cons, car, and cdr. One thing that was not considered in that assignment is the problem of garbage collection - identifying and freeing list elements once they were no longer in use.

Discuss the significance of this in terms of the behaviour of cons, and the concerns a lisp programmer should have about lisp's possible implementations of garbage collection.