This isn't particular to quasiquote. You can reach into any function that returns a literal cons or string.
If this is something you don't want to fix, I'll agree with you there
Yeah, I'm disinclined to try to emulate Arc precisely in this regard because it appears to be an arbitrary artifact of how Arc does quasiquote expansion, and not a defined feature.
Yeah, I'm disinclined to try to emulate Arc precisely in this regard because it appears to be an arbitrary artifact of how Arc does quasiquote expansion, and not a defined feature.
I think the only thing going on here is quotation. Generally, quoted things work like pointers (see http://arclanguage.org/item?id=10248). Because you can still do
arc> (def foo () (cons 1 nil)) ; note: cons creates new data each call
*** redefining foo
#<procedure: foo>
arc> (= ((foo) 0) 2)
2
arc> (foo)
(1)
Then, the reason the quasiquoted thing gets weird results with the qq.arc I ported is that optimizing `(1) manages to switch between always consing new data with (list '1) and trying to reduce runtime consing with '(1).
I'm not (terribly) surprised that the ability to modify literals was intentional. Thanks for that link. I'm still wondering if `(1) expanding to '(1) is intentional or not.
Clearly '(foo) is a literal and `(foo ,bar) is not a literal, right?
I guess it's not a huge stretch to say that `(foo) is a literal. Unfortunately, qq-expand doesn't always expand `(...) with no commas into '(...)
I'm still wondering if `(1) expanding to '(1) is intentional or not.
A quasiquote expander can expand `(1) into '(1) or (list 1), or even (join '(1) ' nil), which is what Bawden's simple, correct, but inefficient quasiquote expander does.
The expander may choose '(1) as being more efficient than (list 1), but isn't required to do so to be a quasiquote expander.
Since it's an optimization, I wouldn't write code that relies on a particular instance of `(1) evaluating to the same list every time, that's just an accidental result of the optimization. Instead, use a plain quote for that.
There. Just updated qq.arc, removing almost 100 lines of cruft in the process. It still passes all the old tests, and (with any luck) is much more pleasant to work with.
This isn't particular to quasiquote. You can reach into any function that returns a literal cons or string.
I know, hence why I talked about 'quote. On principle, I'm equally paranoid about 'quote, 'quasiquote, and literal strings, but I've never mutated strings in my own projects, and I almost exclusively quasiquote my "escaping" cons cells rather than quoting them, so I just glossed over those facets of my paranoia. :-p
it appears to be an arbitrary artifact of how Arc does quasiquote expansion, and not a defined feature.
Like I said, I think there's a relevant pg comment around here somewhere. I've searched some more, but I still can't find it. Maybe it was just my imagination. ^_^;
Oh, wait, fallintothis's post links to it.
Arrgh, it would help if Google weren't so inconsistent. It's a result for ("behavior can be quite useful in some contexts"), but it doesn't show up in the results for ("behavior can be quite useful in some"), and ("can be quite useful in some contexts") has no results at all. Of course, observing this property and posting about it will no doubt change the search results. XD
