I've read a lot of good things about Land of Lisp so I thought that I might go through it to see what there was to see.

    (defun tweak-text (lst caps lit)
      (when lst
        (let ((item (car lst))
          (rest (cdr lst)))
          (cond 
           ; If item = space, then call recursively starting with ret
           ; Then, prepend the space on to the result.
           ((eq item #\space) (cons item (tweak-text rest caps lit)))
           ; if the item is an exclamation point.  Make sure that the
           ; next non-space is capitalized.
           ((member item '(#\! #\? #\.)) (cons item (tweak-text rest t lit)))
           ; if item = " then toggle whether we are in literal mode
           ((eq item #\") (tweak-text rest caps (not lit)))
           ; if literal mode, just add the item as is and continue
           (lit (cons item (tweak-text rest nil lit)))
           ; if either caps or literal mode = true capitalize it?
           ((or caps lit) (cons (char-upcase item) (tweak-text rest nil lit)))
           ; otherwise lower-case it.
           (t (cons (char-downcase item) (tweak-text rest nil nil)))))))

(the comments are mine)
(FYI -- the method signature is (list-of-symbols bool-whether-to-caps bool-whether-to-treat-literally) but the author shortened these to (lst caps lit).)

But anyway, here's the question:
This has (cond... (lit ...) ((or caps lit) ...)) in it. My understanding is that this would translate to if(lit){ ... } else if(caps || lit){...} in a C style syntax. Isn't the or statement redundant then? Is there ever a condition where the (or caps lit) condition will be called if caps is nil?