"What would you use besides conses to represent s-expressions? Maybe that is a good role for cons."
Arrays, objects, pretty much anything that can represent nested sequences. In fact, in PyArc, conses are a class, because Python has an infatuation with classes.
I don't see conses as an "ultimate abstraction". They're a low-level primitive that can be used to create lists, among other things. To put it bluntly, they're a simple way to implement linked lists. The only difference between an array and a linked list is performance, but they have the same semantics.
Most popular languages choose arrays as their default sequence type, but Lisp chose linked lists. I could represent conses as Python lists (which are like arrays), and then define car so it returns list[0] and cdr so it returns list[1:].
As far as Arc programs would be concerned, everything would look exactly the same. The only difference is that certain operations (like prepending) would be slower with arrays than with a linked list. Specifically, (cons 'a some-list) would be O(n) rather than O(1).
So... to say that conses are bad is like saying that arrays are bad. They're both sequence types, that have differing performance characteristics. Use whichever one happens to suit your language/program the best.
