Quote The answer to the previous question is to use the single quote mark, ', in front of an item that you do not wish the interpreter to evaluate. Without the quote you would have received an error message. The quote blocks evaluation of the whole thing, so you don't need quotes on the internal elements of the list. In fact, the ' itself is shorthand for another function.
Cons always takes two arguments.
Usually, the second argument is a list, but the first can be either an atom or a list. The list building functions list and append both allow arbitrary numbers of arguments. List takes all its arguments and makes a list with them as elements. Arguments to list will typically be either atoms or lists. Make sure you understand why list works as shown in these examples.