The ' (quote) symbol is not well defined

[shlomifruchter]

I went through the tutorial and it is great!

However, I think the handling of the quote symbol can be better explained. 'quote' is defined as follows in part 2:

quote takes one argument which is returned directly (without being evaluated).

So it is expected that "quote (1 2 3)" should be evaluated to "(1 2 3)".

On the other hand, according to test 6:

assert_equals([1, 2, 3, True], evaluate(parse("'(1 2 3 #t)"), Environment()))

As far as I understand, ' is a shorthand for quote, so it should be evaluated to "(1 2 3 #t)"

[kvalle]

You're right that (quote (1 2 3)) should evaluate to (1 2 3). As for the test, parse("'(1 2 3 #t)") should indeed evaluate to (1 2 3 #t) as you suggest. The [1, 2, 3, True] expected by the test is the abstract syntax tree form of this expression.

I've updated the test from

assert_equals([1, 2, 3, True], 
              evaluate(parse("'(1 2 3 #t)"), Environment()))

to

assert_equals(parse("(1 2 3 #t)"), 
              evaluate(parse("'(1 2 3 #t)"), Environment()))

in order to be more explicit, although the meaning of the test is unchanged.

Does this answer your question, or have I missunderstood something?

[kvalle]

Still no response; Consider this closed :)