Urk, still sort of too early in the morning; let's try again:

To answer your previous question, when you look at raw alists that
have lists as values, they aren't '((key1 . (value1 value2))),
the dotted pair just becomes a list,   '(key1 value1 value2)).
                                              ^ no paren or dot here.

This can be confusing unless or until you remember the building
blocks of lists.  assq et. and cdr work just fine, but I dislike
this quirk a lot more for constructions, which is avoided by
having make-foreign-status and raise-foreign-error take plists.

- Harold