Re: moderation

[Paul Hudak <Hudak@YALE.ARPA>]

    Hudak made the mysterious comment that Scheme/T doesn't need to
    quote either. ...

Sorry to sound mysterious.  My intent was to point out, as others
have by now, that quoting wasn't *necessary*, just as it isn't in
the lambda calculus; it is simply convenient, as most meta-tools are.

So it seems to me that the only issue is that if one decides to have
a "meta-language," how should it be manifested -- perhaps that's what
you were refering to.  Lisp chose quote, Prolog has a different
mechanism, Barak's "Scheme0" uses yet another.  I suppose they all
have their advantages/disadvantages.

I should clarify one other aspect of my "mysterious" comment:  QUOTE
is really just a way to create a data structure, and thus is not much
different from using, say, strings.  However, it's combination with
EVAL is what makes me shy away from macros.  It's usually the case
that if one is using QUOTE plus EVAL, there's a "cleaner" way to do
it with closures.

    -Paul

P.S. I agree with you that these discussions are OK for this
     mailing-list, but then again I'm not a Scheme expert who has
     perhaps hashed through these issues a hundred times before.