Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!cmcl2!phri!marob!cowan
From: cowan@marob.MASA.COM (John Cowan)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: #( syntax
Message-ID: <655@marob.MASA.COM>
Date: 15 May 89 19:55:21 GMT
References: <8905120152.AA17406@anaconda.Stanford.EDU> <432@soi.UUCP>
Reply-To: cowan@marob.masa.com (John Cowan)
Organization: ESCC  New York City
Lines: 19

In article <432@soi.UUCP> chip@soi.UUCP (Chip Morris) writes:

[Reference to <8905120152AA17406@anaconda.Stanford.EDU>, which explains
that Lucid CL accepts general vectors as self-quoting, whereas Coral and
Franz Allegro don't]

>Coral is OK, and so is Franz Allegro.  If a form isn't
>self-evaluating, i.e. doesn't return itself as a value, then in
>general it must be quoted.  CLtL (Steele) says in section
>5.1.1 what the self-evaluating forms are:  numbers, characters,
>strings,bit-vectors, () and NIL, as well as all keywords.  So
>technically anything else must be quoted, including arrays, vectors,
>and structures.  See also "Common Lisp, The Reference", page 665.

CLtL tells us that a CL implementation may extend the class of evaluatable
constructions beyond the standard variables, function/macro calls, and
self-quoting objects.  It is conforming for an implementation to accept
general vectors as self-quoting; however, it is >not< portable for source
code to depend on this behavior.