During my exploration of different ways to write down lists, I am intrigued by the following list `[[a,b]|c]` which appears in the book 'Prolog and Natural Language Analysis' by Pereira and Shieber (page 42 of the [digital edition](http://www.mtome.com/Publications/PNLA/prolog-digital.pdf)).

At first I thought that such a notation was syntactically incorrect, as it would have had to say `[[a,b]|[c]]`, but after using `write_canonical/1` Prolog returned `'.'('.'(a,'.'(b,[])),c)`.

As far as I can see, this corresponds to the following tree structure (although it seems odd to me that structure would simply end with `c`, without the empty list at the end): 

[![drawing of tree structure](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JPeJM.jpg)](https://i.stack.imgur.com/JPeJM.jpg)

I cannot seem to find the corresponding notation using comma's and brackets though. I thought it would correspond to `[[a,b],c]` (but this obviously returns a different result with `write_canonical/1`). 

Is there no corresponding notation for `[[a,b]|c]` or am I looking at it the wrong way?