>I think that code written where NIL is the sole false value tends to read better than code with a distinguished false value, but I'm open to the idea that uglier code is more reliable.
It's less reliable, and less clean. If you can't see the problem with overloading false, look at C, another language which overloads false and suffers for it.
>Only mistakenly. I used to think that Lisp-1 is better: after all, I'm used to other languages like C or JavaScript where functions and variables share the same namespace.
I have yet to see a disadvantage to being a lisp-1, and it comes with many advantages: we don't have to function and funcall everything, which makes our code a good deal cleaner.
>But it's not an actual descendant of a Lisp
That is definitely wrong. It is emphatically a descendant of Lisp. In fact, the very first paper on Scheme, AI Lab Memo 349, described it as "a full funarg lisp."
We can argue about whether Scheme is a lisp, but its descendance is well-documented: if you can't trust the language's creator on its origins, than who can you trust?
>it's under-specified
This is true. However, R7RS is working on fixing this. And as I understand it, it's even including a standardized procedural macro mechanism, so there you go.
It's less reliable, and less clean. If you can't see the problem with overloading false, look at C, another language which overloads false and suffers for it.
>Only mistakenly. I used to think that Lisp-1 is better: after all, I'm used to other languages like C or JavaScript where functions and variables share the same namespace.
I have yet to see a disadvantage to being a lisp-1, and it comes with many advantages: we don't have to function and funcall everything, which makes our code a good deal cleaner.
>But it's not an actual descendant of a Lisp
That is definitely wrong. It is emphatically a descendant of Lisp. In fact, the very first paper on Scheme, AI Lab Memo 349, described it as "a full funarg lisp."
We can argue about whether Scheme is a lisp, but its descendance is well-documented: if you can't trust the language's creator on its origins, than who can you trust?
>it's under-specified
This is true. However, R7RS is working on fixing this. And as I understand it, it's even including a standardized procedural macro mechanism, so there you go.