Thank you, @hiredman! So in Clojure, cons doesn't allow me to explicitly set the right hand side of a cell, because it expects a list as 2nd argument. In Clojure, a list is made up of cons cells, but I cannot manipulate the cells directly, right?
it is complicated, clojure tends to be more concerned with seqs, which are not a concrete data type
clojure has an explicit list type, but it isn't used nearly as often, most of the time when you think something is a list it is actually some species of seq
and clojure.core/cons builds a seq, not a list
but it is true that neither seqs nor lists can be improper in clojure