Re: proposal to make null string handling more emacs-y

[Eli Barzilay]

Richard Stallman <address@hidden> writes:

>  
>     I'm really really happy that Emacs Lisp isn't Scheme-like.  Stuff like
>
>     (assq 'foo bar) ⇒  #f
>
>     would just drive me totally batty.
>
> I think splitting apart the different meanings of nil in Lisp was an
> unfortunate mistake in Scheme.  This sort of cleanliness is only
> desirable theoretically, not in practice.

As a (semi-fake) "Schemer", I can say that it's perfectly fine in
practice too.  It catches real errors.  In analogy to what you wrote a
few seconds later -- it catches errors that would otherwise get
papered over.

There's obviously a subjective line here, where Elisp and Scheme are
going in different directions, and IIUC, Steve's point is that "" =~
nil is continuing in the same direction that elisp already went to.
(But of course the question is how far you're willing to go, otherwise
you end up with "wat".)

-- 
          ((lambda (x) (x x)) (lambda (x) (x x)))          Eli Barzilay:
                    http://barzilay.org/                   Maze is Life!