"Thompson, David" <dthomps...@worcester.edu> writes:
> On Sat, Apr 12, 2025 at 12:01 PM Tomas Volf <~@wolfsden.cz> wrote:
>>
>> > - null is the symbol 'null
>>
>> Out of curiosity, what are your thoughts about using #nil instead?
>
> My original patch from 10 years ago did this. Mark Weaver then
> explained to me that #nil was added specifically for the purpose of
> supporting Emacs Lisp on the Guile VM and shouldn't be used in Scheme
> code. The symbol 'null works well because there is no symbol type in
> JSON so there's no ambiguity.
Thanks for the explanation. I asked not due to perceived ambiguity, but
due to how #nil interacts with conditions. It would be handy to be able
to write
(when (assq-ref data 'foo)
...)
instead of
(when (not (eq? 'null (or (assq-ref data 'foo) 'null)))
...)
Tomas
--
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
