In my runtime project, nil and t are ordinary global variables... if someone turns out to want the rebind protection feature, I'll add it as a compiler extension (which other people could then choose to apply, or not, as they wished).
What I would do is make it print a warning, but still allow it. Something like, "hey, you! it's a bad idea to rebind nil; you'll probably break everything! use (= nil ()) to fix the mess you probably made"
Printing a warning is a good idea. Whether rebinding nil could be fixed with "(= nil ())" is an interesting question, you might (or might not, I haven't tried it) find that rebinding nil breaks Arc so badly that = no longer works... :-)
I see a potential for a contest here: how to permanently break Arc (with "permanently" meaning you can't recover by typing something at the REPL), in the most interesting way, using the fewest characters. (Non-interesting being, for example, going into an infinite loop so that you don't return to the REPL).
Quite possibly. It should work in my interpreter, though. Actually, () and nil are two different values, but they're special-cased to be eq to each other. It was the only way I found to make one print as "nil" and the other print as "()" From an external point of view, though, they should seem the same.
