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Which constants must be quoted?
Date: Thursday, 13 February 1986 15:58-EST
From: Jonathan A Rees <JAR at MC.LCS.MIT.EDU>
So I think that an intermediate position between 2 and 3 *can* be
justified by the principle of Occam's razor, and we should disallow
self-evaluation of vectors, procedures, and other "random" objects
because it's unnecessary. That is, the class of legitimate programs
should be as small as is reasonable.
I disagree with Chris's statement that it is "Lisp tradition" for random
objects to self-evaluate.
I agree with you about this -- I wasn't thinking about objects like
procedures and such. In fact, when I wrote that I had in mind only
objects for which there is read syntax, specifically: lists, symbols,
vectors, strings, characters, numbers, and booleans. I believe that
tradition does conform to my statement with this restriction. All of
the other things should cause errors, as you seem to suggest.
I don't care whether vectors are self-evaluating, but I think that
strings and numbers should be. As for characters and booleans: I
prefer that they self-evaluate, because I use them often and there
seems no very good reason to require that they be quoted.