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From: quale@puff.cs.wisc.edu (quale)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Overloading of NIL (as empty list and logical falsity)
Message-ID: <2470@puff.cs.wisc.edu>
Date: 24 Mar 89 03:20:31 GMT
References: <8247@csli.STANFORD.EDU> <9840@megaron.arizona.edu> <37807@think.UUCP>
Reply-To: quale@uhura.wisc.edu
Distribution: na
Organization: U of Wisconsin
Lines: 16

In article <37807@think.UUCP> barmar@brigit.think.com.UUCP (Barry Margolin) writes:
>I think most language theorists would now agree that Lisp's
>overloading of NIL was a bad idea.  I don't think any non-Lisp-like
>languages copy this.
>
>Barry Margolin
>Thinking Machines Corp.

Although I think Scheme's overloading of NIL is its greatest misfeature,
it could be worse -- C doesn't have a boolean type, and the wonderfully
elegant decison to overload integers for this purpose sabotages compiler
error checking.  (And also causes confusion.  There was even some discussion
on the net about whether false is always 0 in C.)

  -- Doug Quale
  quale@uhura.cs.wisc.edu