[Kawa-commonlisp-dev] 'NIL != '()

[Charles Turner]

The following equality does not currently hold in Kawa CL

(eq 'nil '()) ;=> nil

but it should.

I'm not very confident, but I think this is because nil is looked up
in the EmptyNamespace (or current lisp package in my repository),
whereas () is processed by LispReader#makeNil, which returns
LList.Empty. Of course, the mapping in EmptyNamespace is nil =>
LList.Empty, which is confusing me, I guess you'd need a RefExp to get
the LList.Empty.

The initialisation in CommonLisp:

  public static final LList FALSE = LList.Empty;
  public static final Expression nilExpr = new QuoteExp(FALSE);

seems to point to the problem, obviously they were designed to be
different objects, which seems wrong to me, but this is code Per
wrote, so I'm not confident I understand what's happening here.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

Charles.