3 ms·

NIL is certainly an overly-overloaded concept in Common Lisp. Scheme did a better job by separating the boolean type from the empty list but in practice I don't

NIL is certainly an overly-overloaded concept in Common Lisp. Scheme did a better job by separating the boolean type from the empty list but in practice I don't find NIL much of a hindrance in CL.

jinwoo68 5y ago
Huh? In my opinion it’s Scheme’s one million dollar mistake. Common Lisp’s identification of NIL and the empty list makes things very ergonomic in so many cases that I wonder if it’s by design or we were just lucky.
- spfzero 5y ago
  NIL equating to the empty list is fine. The empty list equating to: didn’t find what you wanted, but here’s an empty list instead? Hope you weren’t looking for an empty list though, then you’d be really confused, sorry. Nah, I’ll take “false” thanks.
  - kazinator 5y ago
    > Nah, I’ll take “false” thanks. false is an object which can be stored in the container, and which you could be looking for. You've just migrated the problem away from empty lists.
    - spfzero 5y ago
      That's right, then I'd just have a mirror of the original problem. I could store empty lists to represent false, but that's not really any better.
- deleted 5y ago
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