[plt-scheme] Semantics of quote

At Mon, 23 Jun 2008 18:57:55 -0400, Aleks Bromfield 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?

The conversation has moved on, but I can explain some history to answer
to the original question:

Early in planning for v4.0, we decided not to change Scheme output
printing; at the time, it seemed too big a change to tackle. In
retrospect, it doesn't sound much bigger than the changes that we did
make. But the question is tied up with the general problem of
configuring output printing for different languages, which is something
we still don't have a handle on. (Maybe it would have been better to
force that question earlier rather than later; I don't know.)

Matthew