On Sun, Jul 1, 2012 at 10:09 AM, David A. Wheeler <[email protected]>wrote:
> Alan Manuel Gloria <[email protected]> said:
>
> >This seems to privelege QUOTE et al. too much. Or should they indeed be
> privileged?
>
> I agree with your intuition. Privileging quote isn't *necessarily* bad,
> but we should strive for the principle of least surprise, and this specific
> proposal seems like a "weird exception" that I think would make the format
> harder, not easier, to understand. In particular, you pointed out that:
>
> > '
> > ..x
> > ..y
> > => yields (quote x y), which, while wrong, is still what I expect. It's
> not clear from this alone what it should mean.
>
> I agree with you. Having this expression yield "(quote (x y))" would make
> it very inconsistent with the non-quote case, and I think we should strive
> for consistency.
>
Well if it's about consistency, a basic inspection of the QUOTE and GROUP
productions suggest that they are treated differently.
In particular (again initial . means spaces):
group group x
..y
' ' x
..y
the first yields (group x y), the second yields (quote (quote (x y)))
How about instead considering the quote character as a straight
abbreviation for the quote symbol?
To differentiate, in current s-expressions the quote character is actually
a special reader syntax where it means "wrap the next expression _x_ in the
list (quote _x_)".
My proposal is that (outside of modern-expressions) it simply means "the
quote symbol".
So:
' '
..x
==>
quote quote
..x
==>
(quote quote x)
---
Also:
'
..'
....x
==>
quote
..quote
....x
==>
(quote (quote x))
Whatcha think?
Sincerely,
AmkG
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