Some lisp's have a limited mapcar which can only operate on one list (making it like perl's map), but in other lisp's mapcar will operate on a list of lists, taking the car of each list, making a list from that, and using that as the first argument to the function, then taking the next element of each list, etc., and returning a list of the results. I think Common Lisp has the limited version, I'm not positive. The Lisp's I've used, AutoLISP and UCI LISP (long ago), both would take a list of lists.

And tye's 'mapcaru' ('mapcar', but use the (u)ndefined value for missing elements) was just a different implementation which deals with lists of differing lengths in a different way.