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2 points by shader 4792 days ago | link | parent

I've run into issues with nil the symbol vs nil the value. It's caused some issues when I wanted to use arc's sym type to represent variable names in a class compiler project I'm working on. If the variable's name is nil, all kinds of things stop working, and I've had to resort to calling some scheme functions directly to get proper handling of symbols.

I wish that 'nil and nil could be kept somewhat separate, with the first being just a symbol, and the second being equivalent to the base value for all data structures. Otherwise the symbol type is broken and inconsistent, since you cannot accurately (or at least completely) represent code as data.



2 points by Pauan 4792 days ago | link

My interpreter treats 'nil and nil as separate. Not sure if that's a good idea, but I'd rather wait and see if it causes problems before changing it:

  (is 'nil nil) -> nil
This does raise one interesting question, though... obviously 'nil is a sym, but if (is nil ()) is t, then shouldn't (type nil) return 'cons?

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2 points by waterhouse 4790 days ago | link

() is not a cons cell, and while (car ()) is well-defined (to be nil), you can't set the car or cdr of (). It is definitely not a cons.

On the other hand, (listp nil) should be true. In fact, its precise definition should probably be (and is, or is equivalent to) this:

  (def listp (x)
    (or (is x nil)
        (and (acons x)
             (listp (cdr x)))))

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1 point by Pauan 4789 days ago | link

However, I can easily define nil so that it's type is 'cons, but it would throw an error if you try to assign to the car or cdr. That may break code that assumes that 'cons != nil though.

Actually, I could represent nil as an actual 'cons cell, so that assigning to the car or cdr would work. Crazy? Probably. Especially since nil is a singleton and you can't create more nil's, so it would be a global change.

Right now, nil does have a type of 'sym, but it seems weird to treat it mostly like an empty cons cell, but not have it's type be 'cons. So I figured I could play around with it and try giving it a type of 'cons and see how badly it breaks stuff.

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2 points by evanrmurphy 4789 days ago | link

"Actually, I could represent nil as an actual 'cons cell, so that assigning to the car or cdr would work. Crazy?"

That's a bit crazy. :)

PicoLisp does something reminiscent. Every one of its data structures (numbers, symbols, nil and conses) is implemented using the low-level cons cell structure (i.e. a pair of machine words). [1] They talk about nil's representation fulfilling its dual nature as both a symbol whose value is nil and a list whose car and cdr are nil; both the symbol predicate and the list predicate return true when applied to nil:

  : (sym? NIL)
  -> T
  : (lst? NIL)   
  -> T
I'm not sure that they let nil's car and cdr be assignable though, because "NIL is a special symbol which exists exactly once in the whole system." [2]

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[1] http://software-lab.de/doc/ref.html#vm

[2] http://software-lab.de/doc/ref.html#nilSym

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Update: Oops, I just noticed a lot of this comment could be considered redundant with the grandparent comment by waterhouse. Sorry for that.

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1 point by rocketnia 4792 days ago | link

My code has a lot of [string:or _ "nil"] to handle that kind of stuff. ^_^ I've just kinda accepted it ever since http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10793.

I do 'string lists into strings a lot, but that would continue to work if 'nil and '() were separate values.

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1 point by aw 4792 days ago | link

If the variable's name is nil, all kinds of things stop working

Can you give an example? Are you trying to use nil as a variable name in Arc, or simply to have a data structure representing variables where some of those variables are named nil?

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1 point by shader 4790 days ago | link

I'm creating a compiler for a class, and I've been representing variable names in the ast with symbols. I could use strings instead, and may end up doing so, but symbols seemed a more elegant solution.

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