[q-lang-users] quote evaluation

[Kristof B. <kr...@vl...>]

Hi,

first I'd like to say that Q is an interesting language, and it is
surprising to find such a complete documentation for a relatively
unknown language.  I find special forms particularly interesting.  I
wrote part of a library to write html pages as expressions, where you
can write an html tag as function application (like scheme sxml).

For example:

(to_html
  (html
   (head (title ~Homepage))
   (body
    (h1 ~Title)
    (a (href = "www.url.org/adress")
     "ref"))))

=> a nested html object

However I came across the following strange behaviour.  In the
equation: 

  test '(A B) = ('A, 'B);

I would expect test '(a (2 + 3)) to evaluate to ('a, '(2 + 3)),
however it evaluates to ('a, '5).  Is this the defined behaviour?
I would think that quote is a special form which doesn't evaluate
it's argument.

Also, when using the Q interpreter to write scripts, it always prints
the last object to stdout.  Is there an option to turn it off?  If
I want to write a script that outputs some text, I wouldn't want the
output to be clobbered with an object.

Regards,
Kristof Bastiaensen