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Funcall

[Our thanks to John H. Remmers for allowing his material from his programming languages course to be incorporated into this section.]

FUNCALL is similar to APPLY, except that the function arguments are at the same level as the function description instead of being in a sublist, as APPLY is typically used. For example:

> (FUNCALL '+ 3 5 9) 17

In fact, the similarity is closer than this description indicates for

(FUNCALL '+ 1 2 3)

not only evaluates to the same result as

(APPLY '+ '(1 2 3))

but also to the same result as

(APPLY '+ 1 2 3 nil)