From Frederking

[Guy.Steele@CMU-CS-A.ARPA]

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Received: from CMU-CS-CAD.ARPA by CMU-CS-A.ARPA; 20 Aug 84 14:14:32 EDT
Date: Mon, 20 Aug 1984 18:09:00 -0000
From: Robert.Frederking@cmu-cs-cad.arpa
To: guy.steele@cmu-cs-a.arpa
Subject: CommonLisp (vs. VaxLisp) question
Message-ID: <1984.8.20.18.1.32.Robert.Frederking@cmu-cs-cad.arpa>

	Hi.  I've been doing some programming in DEC VaxLisp, and have found
something annoying about the way they do structures.  The way that the
automatically-defined type predicates work, you get an error if you pass
them nil.  So, if you define a structure "ship", (ship-p nil) gives you an
error.  What I was wondering was whether this is required by the CommonLisp
standard, or whether an implementor could allow nil to be the null structure.
I can't really tell from the CommonLisp manual.
	The reason this is annoying is that I (and others) have a tendency
to write code so that nils pass through without being detected.  Getting
errors when testing nils requires one either to screen for them, or write a
predicate that screens out nils and calls the built-in predicate (kind of
defeating its purpose).  This has been the main problem in converting code
to use structures that originally used lists.  Let me know what you think.
Thanks.

	Bob
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