Clearly I am doing a poor job explaining my question.

Let me try again. As I understand it, every Symbol is an instance if Lisp_Symbol. The Lisp_Object is an integer that can represent multiple types with tags defined by Lisp_Type. If the tag is 0, then the type is a symbol. In that case you would treat the rest of the bytes in the Lisp_Object as pointer to a Lisp_Symbol instance. However if the symbol nil is defined as 0, then it is not a pointer to anything. How then do you access that symbol? Is there special case code to handle the null pointer?

I hope that question makes more sense. Let me know where my understanding is wrong.
On Oct 26, 2022, 10:16 AM -0600, Matt Armstrong <matt@rfc20.org>, wrote:
> Troy Hinckley <troyhinckley@gmail.com> writes:
>
> > but 0 would not be a valid pointer.
>
> I am a confused by this. 0 is a valid value for a C pointer. This is
> what NULL is, etc. You must not dereference it, but it is a valid
> value.