6.23.2.1 Nil

nil in ELisp is an amalgam of Scheme’s #f and '(). It is false, and it is the end-of-list; thus it is a boolean, and a list as well.

Guile has chosen to support nil as a separate value, distinct from #f and '(). This allows existing Scheme and Elisp code to maintain their current semantics. nil, which in Elisp would just be written and read as nil, in Scheme has the external representation #nil.

This decision to have nil as a low-level distinct value facilitates interoperability between the two languages. Guile has chosen to have Scheme deal with nil as follows:

(boolean? #nil) ⇒ #t
(not #nil) ⇒ #t
(null? #nil) ⇒ #t

And in C, one has:

scm_is_bool (SCM_ELISP_NIL) ⇒ 1
scm_is_false (SCM_ELISP_NIL) ⇒ 1
scm_is_null (SCM_ELISP_NIL) ⇒ 1

In this way, a version of fold written in Scheme can correctly fold a function written in Elisp (or in fact any other language) over a nil-terminated list, as Elisp makes. The converse holds as well; a version of fold written in Elisp can fold over a '()-terminated list, as made by Scheme.

On a low level, the bit representations for #f, #t, nil, and '() are made in such a way that they differ by only one bit, and so a test for, for example, #f-or-nil may be made very efficiently. See libguile/boolean.h, for more information.

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