[plt-scheme] Semantics of quote

While what Carl says is true, I believe the spirit of the question is
more like "why isn't constructor (or quasiquote) printing the default
for the 'scheme' and related languages"?

To which I say "I have suggested this myself! :)"

Robby

On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 6:10 PM, Carl Eastlund <cce at ccs.neu.edu> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 6:57 PM, Aleks Bromfield <aleks at cs.brown.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 04:06:55PM -0400, Matthias Felleisen wrote:
>>> The sad thing is that this is needlessly confusing, especially for
>>> beginners. It is one of the reasons we have teaching languages that
>>> (1) don't allow quote for anything but symbols (pop quiz: is ''a a
>>> symbol?) and (2) renders things as constructed values (think abstract
>>> or universal algebra, if you're familiar with that).
>>
>> Out of curiosity, why isn't constructor-style printing the default for
>> the module language as well?
>
> One reason is that there's no way to know what the constructors "look
> like" in the user's language.  They could be named anything; the
> language's syntax may even vary from Scheme.  Student languages are
> simpler; all the constructors are known ahead of time.
>
> A given language can always set up a custom printer based on its own
> constructors, but DrScheme can't do that automatically.
>
> --
> Carl Eastlund
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