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.
"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]
