[racket-dev] OT: stump misunderstands Scheme?

That expression at the end is somehow turning a procedure back into
its quoted form. I have no idea if a Scheme that did that would be R5
or not, but Racket definitely does not allow that (and neither did any
other programming language that I've ever worked on).

Overall, I'd say, you should contact Aaron directly, instead of asking here.

Robby

On Tue, Nov 16, 2010 at 4:07 PM, John Clements
<clements at brinckerhoff.org> wrote:
> I'm reading Aaron Stump's "Directly Reflective Meta-Programming," and it appears to me that either he misunderstands Scheme, or that I misunderstand it. Are there many Scheme dialects in which his use of quasiquote to embed a 3d value would successfully pry open the syntactic term?
>
> (Excerpt below)
>
> Sorry for the OT post,
>
> John
>
>
>
> 2.1.2   Variables in Meta-Programming
>
> A meta-programming language is scope safe (or hygienic) iff variables may not be captured or escape their scopes during computation. Dynamic variables in Emacs LISP and Common LISP are a good example of a violation of scope safety [30, 24]. Scheme R5RS’s macro language is designed to be scope safe [21]. Other constructs in Scheme R5RS, however, enable violation of scope safety, even though the language does not have dynamic variables. For a violation of scope safety in spirit, though not technically, we have that (caddr ’(lambda (x) x)) evaluates to x. According to the R5RS language definition, ’(lambda (x) x) is a literal expression, and hence the occurrences of x in it are not variables at all, but just (unscoped) literal data. So in this example, a variable has been created (namely, the resulting unquoted x), but not by means of removing it from its scope. Using quasiquotation, however, the example may be modified to give a true violation of scope safety. The following expression extracts the variable x from its scope, by transforming the binding lambda expression into a piece of literal data, and then extracting and evaluating the quoted variable.
>
> ((lambda (y) (eval ‘(car (cdr (cdr ’,y))))) (lambda (x) x))
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