I am reading SPJ's seminal work "Implementing lazy functional languages on stock hardware: the Spinless Tagless G-machine" (1992) and I am confused by something which may be a minor notational error, or may be a key detail I am misunderstanding. The paper is available here http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.53.3729 On page 26 we have aList = {} \n Cons {thing,nil} nil = {} \n Nil {} but I have not seen this use of the notation elsewhere in the paper. It strikes me that this should be aList = {} \n {} -> Cons {thing,nil} nil = {} \n {} -> Nil {} Is my intuition correct, or am I missing a key detail? Thanks, Tom