[racket] Why does (case ...) quote its matching value expressions?

Look for evcase. -- Matthias


On Dec 21, 2014, at 11:58 PM, J Arcane wrote:

> Up with a horrible ear-ache this morning I decided to include a FizzBuzz example in Heresy, the Racket #lang I've been working on, and ran into an unexpected behavior in the (case ...) statement.
> 
> In many languages with case, you can make the testing value a constant, and then make the matching clauses actual calculations which then match against that constant. So when doing FizzBuzz in C-like languages you can do something like "switch 0" and then "case x % 3" for the matching clauses.
> 
> It turns out this doesn't work in Racket, because Racket quotes the values in the matching clauses so they do not evaluate. Specifically, it narrows down to doing this in (case/sequential-test ...): #`(equal? v 'k)
> 
> I can implement an alternate version that works as I expect (and will probably include it in Heresy) just by removing that quote in my version, but I was curious as to the reasoning behind this behavior and if perhaps there's some explanation for it that I may've missed.
> 
> Any insights appreciated,
> John Berry 
> 
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