[q-lang-users] Request to add new reserved words "quote" and "QUOTE" to Q

[John C. <co...@cc...>]

This is a request to make the identifiers "quote" and "QUOTE" reserved
and illegal in Q 7.1 and future releases.

In the interest of getting some interoperability between the Lisp family
of languages and Q, I'm designing an S-expression representation of
Q expressions -- not declarations or definitions, just expressions.
Doing this permits a representation of a Q expression to be easily
manipulated by Scheme or Common Lisp programs.

The basic Q types are integers, floats, booleans, strings, files, symbols,
applications, lists, and tuples.  Of these, files are hopeless (there
is no standardized representation of them).  Integers, floats, strings,
symbols, and tuples have clear S-expression representations (tuples
are Scheme vectors or Common Lisp simple general vectors, in either
case notated "#(a b c)".  Booleans can be represented in S-expressions
by the symbols "true" and "false", just as on the Q side; in Scheme,
the special boolean values #t and #f can be mapped back and forth.

Lists and applications, however, are both represented by lists in both
Scheme and CL, and only context distinguishes them.  By reserving the word
"quote", we can use "(quote (a b c)) to represent a list and "(a b c)"
to represent one or more Q applications (right associative as usual).

Because Lisp is not case-sensitive, the internal representation of the
symbol named "quote" may be either "quote" or "QUOTE", so both must be
reserved in Q.  If these words are not reserved, then the Q application
"quote [a,b]" would have the same S-expression representation as "[a,b]".

This should be a really trivial change to the compiler and interpreter
that can be folded into 7.1, I think.

-- 
John Cowan                              <co...@cc...>
            http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
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