The escaping system is more robust than I realized. I think some of my concerns are definitely addressed with being able to assign escaped numerical characters, etc.
> However, I could see this being done: have nil be escapable, so that |nil| is the symbol you can rebind, while nil is the literal empty list. ...And then are they eq?
I looked into this and think it's kind of elegant now. 'nil is unescapable like non-special character symbols in general are [1]:
arc> (is 'nil '\n\i\l '|nil|) ; like your 'ach example
t
But () is escapable (as special characters typically are):
[1] I was frustrated momentarily when I couldn't escape 't until I realized it was the same way. As you pointed out, at least it is locally rebindable by default. And then I suppose 't isn't an especially desirable global variable name anyway.