On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 10:47 AM David Kastrup <d...@gnu.org> wrote: > it seems somehow wrong to see stuff without quotes > that has not previously been defined. >
Actually, while I think I follow why you're saying this, it's been my experience (both as a user and as a provider of software) that most people find it difficult to rejoin it in their head that the same entity flows quoted in some contexts and unquoted in others. In other words: imagine we had a prefix form for assignment, namely \assign, same meaning as the current operator '='. I'd think folks would find it weird to have \assign "theanswer" 42 and then dereference it as \theanswer as opposed to having \assign theanswer 42 as the assign/define statement. I think this is because it being an unquoted string (PERLfolk call these barewords) makes it feel more like an identifier, even if technically it's a string (for the time being). It also has some advantages for example it's easier to work with names being always unquoted when you're grepping for them, kinda scenario I think things that work like language-level names, for this reason, should flow unquoted, even if this requires effectively supporting barewords. L -- Luca Fascione Distinguished Engineer - Ray Tracing - NVIDIA
