[Chicken-users] The predicate "atom?" considered bizarre

[John Cowan]

While messing around with some stuff in Paul Graham's paper "The Roots
of Lisp" I was quite surprised to find that Chicken's "atom?" predicate
returns #f on the empty list.  This is the documented behavior.

This is contrary to historic practice from Lisp 1.5 through Common Lisp.
(Of course that is partly because () = NIL in that tradition, and NIL
is a symbol.)  R1RS was the last Scheme standard to specify ATOM, and
it had the same semantics then.

Why was this changed?  Can it be fixed?

-- 
That you can cover for the plentiful            John Cowan
and often gaping errors, misconstruals,         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
and disinformation in your posts                address@hidden
through sheer volume -- that is another
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