I like the idea of the main (if ...) semanics being just another equality check or dynamic type check: "Is this nil?" If falsiness overlaps with multiple other dynamic types, then we end up having confusing crosshatching where one extension wants to do X with any falsy value and another extension wants to do Y with any list.

  (a < b < c)
  => (< (< a b) c)   ; watch out if b is nil

  (< nil x)          ; should always return nil

a) There's still no boolean type. The type of false is symbol. (The type of nil has always been nil; maybe I'll now make it list.)

b) if treats both nil and false as false-y values.

c) nil and false are not equal.

d) Comparison operators now short-circuit on false BUT NOT nil.

I can mostly use either in place of the other. But I'm trying to be disciplined about returning false from predicates and nil from functions returning lists.

Wart now has four hard-coded symbols: nil, object, caller_scope and false.[1]

Thoughts? It was surprisingly painless to make all my tests pass. Can anybody think of bugs with this kinda-unconventional framework? If you want to try it out:

  $ git clone http://github.com/akkartik/wart
  # Optionally "git checkout 0ff47b6bce" if I later revert this experiment.
  $ cd wart
  $ ./wart
  ready! type in an expression, then hit enter twice. ctrl-d exits.

  let foo fn (foo () 34)
  => (object function {sig, body})

  $ time ./wart
  ready! type in an expression, then hit enter twice. ctrl-d exits.
  => nil

  real    0m29.200s
  user    0m27.602s
  sys     0m0.000s

  (if t 'hi 'bye)
  020lookup.cc:28 no binding for t
  => bye

  (<- t 't)
  => t
  (if t 'hi 'bye)
  => hi

Once I got the landscape laid out in my head, I started objecting to it less, because I could make sense of it. You're most of the way there:

- false is a separate, canonical false value.

- t (if you chose to have it) is a separate, canonical truth value.

- nil is an empty list, but empty lists are false.

Compare to Python's True, False, and []. The major differences being:

1. No first class boolean type. In wart, this produces more of a disconnect between t and false. t (i.e., 't) is just a normal symbol whose truth value is incidental. But false is a special, unassignable keyword.

  (<- false 'hi)
  => hi
  false
  => false

  >>> False < 10
  True
  >>> 867 + True
  868
  >>> isinstance(True, int)
  True
  >>> isinstance(0, bool)
  False
  >>> True, False = 0, 1
  >>> if True: print "hi"
  ...
  >>> if False: print "hi"
  ...
  hi

I hadn't realized how close to python I've gotten. Seems right given how the whitespace and keyword args are inspired by it. On rosetta code I found a cheap way to get syntax highlighting was to tag my wart snippets with lang python :)

I've been using 1 as the default truth value, and it's not assignable either. I was trying to avoid an extra hard-coded symbol, but now that I've added false perhaps I should also add true.. I'm not averse to going whole-hog on a boolean type, I'd just like to see a concrete use case that would benefit from them. pos seems a reasonable case for keeping 0 truth-y, and the fact that lists include the empty list seems a reasonable case so far to keep nil false-y. But you're right, I might yet make empty strings and tables false-y.

While I personally like 0 being truthy, I don't see this as a convincing reason.

I'd treat 'pos exactly the same way as 'find. They're even conceptually similar, one finding the key and the other finding the value. For 'find, the value we find might be falsy, so truthiness isn't enough to distinguish success from failure. The same might as well be true for 'pos.

---

"But you're right, I might yet make empty strings and tables false-y."

What if the table is mutable? That's an interesting can of worms. :)

JavaScript has 7 falsy values, all of which are immutable. If we know something's always falsy, we also know it encodes a maximum of ~2.8 bits of information--and usually much less than that. It takes unusual effort to design a program that uses all 7 of those values as distinct cases of a single variable.

This means if we have a variant of Arc's (and ...) or (all ...) that short-circuits when it finds a truthy value, we don't usually have to worry about skipping over valuable information in the falsy values.

If every mutable table is falsy as long as it's empty, then a falsy value can encode some valuable information that a practical program would care about, namely the reference to a particular mutable table.

---

"(True, False = 0, 1 :( That's the ugliest thing I've ever seen python allow. At least throw a warning, python! Better no booleans than this monstrosity.)"

There's some rationale here:

http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/

http://docs.python.org/2/whatsnew/2.3.html

http://www.python.org/download/releases/2.2.1/NEWS

The PEP describes the design and rationale of introducing booleans to Python this way. Version 2.3 implements this. Version 2.2.1 preemptively implements bool(), True, and False to simplify backporting from 2.3.

Notably, the variable names "True" and "False" were chosen to be similar to the variable name "None", and all three of these are just variables, not reserved words.

Later, version 2.4 made it an error to assign to None:

http://docs.python.org/2/whatsnew/2.4.html

  (aif (mem f seq)
    <operate on car.it>)

  (aif (pos f seq)
    <operate on seq.it>)

I think the error is that None, False and True were ever 'constants' rather than literals.

http://python-history.blogspot.com/2013/11/story-of-none-tru...

Speaking of which, why are you making false and nil count as symbols at all?

  $ wart
  g++ -O3 -Wall -Wextra -fno-strict-aliasing boot.cc -o wart_bin        # (takes ~15 seconds)
  starting up...       (takes ~15 seconds)
  ready! type in an expression, then hit enter twice. ctrl-d exits.