common-lisp Booleans and Generalized Booleans Generalized Booleans
Example
Actually any value different from NIL is considered a true value in Common Lisp. For instance:
CL-USER> (let ((a (+ 2 2)))
(if a
a
"Oh my! 2 + 2 is equal to NIL!"))
4
This fact can be combined with the boolean operators to make programs more concise. For instance, the above example is equivalent to:
CL-USER> (or (+ 2 2) "Oh my! 2 + 2 is equal to NIL!")
4
The macro OR evaluates its arguments in order from left to right and stops as soon as it finds a non-NIL value, returning it. If all of them are NIL, the value returned is NIL:
CL-USER> (or (= 1 2) (= 3 4) (= 5 6))
NIL
Analogously, the macro AND evaluates its arguments from left to right and returns the value of the last, if all of them are evaluated to non-NIL, otherwise stops the evaluation as soon as it finds NIL, returning it:
CL-USER> (let ((a 2)
(b 3))
(and (/= b 0) (/ a b)))
2/3
CL-USER> (let ((a 2)
(b 0))
(and (/= b 0) (/ a b)))
NIL
For these reasons, AND and OR can be considered more similar to control structures of other languages, rather than to boolean operators.
