Subject: Re: On conditionals
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Thu, 22 Nov 2001 00:21:08 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3215377267841910@naggum.net>

* Thomas F. Burdick
| Would it really kill people to put a couple (not (null ..))s here and
| there, and make their intentions more explicit?

  Yes.  Adding (not (null ...)) to previously obvious code would make
  everything nearly unreadable.  Besides, the intention _is_ to return the
  empty list to those who look for a list and false to those who want a
  boolean value.  This is an important property of Common Lisp.  Scheme
  does not have this property, and consequently Scheme systems have a
  gazillion small functions that are anal-retentively type-specific.  One
  of the reasons I like Common Lisp is that it has none of this nonsense.

///
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