Re: What does the coding system nil mean?

[Oliver Scholz]

Jesper Harder <harder@myrealbox.com> writes:

> Eli Zaretskii <eliz@elta.co.il> writes:
>
[...]
>> IMHO, it's no more odd than this:
>>
>>    M-: (listp nil) RET => t
>
> I would find it a lot more odd if (listp ()) did not return t -- nil
> is the empty list, after all.

Well ...

(and (eq nil '())
     (symbolp '())
     (listp '())
     (atom '())
     (not '()))

[Not to mention (car nil) => nil.]

It's funny that nil never seems to stop being fodder for an
argument ... 

In Emacs Lisp nil/'() is some sort of a Trickster deity in the
pantheon of data types.

Personally I like this a lot and I find it very convenient. YMMV, of
course. Yet, IMO this “overloading” just emphasizes the fact that
lists are a prominent data type.

Hmm … actually C with its NULL/0 isn't so much different here.

    Oliver
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