This is a trivial sort of ridiculous, though. Nil and the empty list are logically undistinguishable.
The reason I made something so incomplete in superficial respects like this is that I focused instead on things that mattered. Particularly, making programs shorter-- which I deliberately phrase in that low-key way, but which is in fact pretty near identical with what programming languages are for. In that respect Arc seems from my experience to be significantly better than CL or Scheme.
The funny thing is that just as you did this with Arc I have been trying to push somethinganything out the door on my own product (it too is pretty far along, it too has a ways to go) just to motivate me with user feedback. Seriously reconsidering...
I think your focus entirely on shortness is a bit misguided. If that's your goal, you should give up and just use Perl or similar. But of course that isn't you're entire goal, so you're being (unintentionally) misleading. I'm sure a goal isn't inconsistency like this.
Perl programs for doing common things to strings are short in characters. They're not so short in tokens. But more importantly, Perl doesn't have the kind of brevity you can get from having macros.
