Well l is a cell pointer to a list. The nested if-then-else is riffing on the cell's tag to hide all the numerous internal representations for an atom/string, e

Well l is a cell pointer to a list. The nested if-then-else is riffing on the cell's tag to hide all the numerous internal representations for an atom/string, eg. intern'd to cell, in fixed atom-table, as malloc'd C-string, as slice of some other string or somewhere in a mmap'd file. It's ugly, but that's C sometimes... the ugly truth.