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2 points by akkartik 1426 days ago | link | parent

If I found a way to "roll forward" and lose all trace of nil from the language, would that be acceptable?

(I tried briefly but haven't managed it yet. So it's probably faster to just roll back. I'm just curious about the question.)



2 points by zck 1426 days ago | link

Interesting concept. I feel like I'd be ok with it? I want to say we should bind `nil` to `'()`, so existing code would continue to work, but I might be overindexing on compatability and what I'm used to.

I will admit to not being super sure what the real differences between nil and '() are. Presumably it's more than "what is the human-readable representation of the value that terminates a list/is the false value". But I'm not sure what. Also, is there a difference between the quoted and unquoted version? It feels odd to write () in a repl unquoted -- usually, I expect parens to mean a function or macro call.

Prior discussions I've found:

* https://github.com/arclanguage/anarki/pull/145#issuecomment-... * http://arclanguage.org/item?id=11723 (ten years ago Tuesday!) indicates using '() helps with Racket interop * http://arclanguage.org/item?id=21047

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