Racket Noob wrote at 09/18/2011 04:41 PM:
Ok, maybe this is not something that's important in other programming languages, but it *is* important in lisps. As a lisp educator, how can you *not* to teach this fundamental fact about lisp?
To me, speaking of real use of the language, it seems a lot less important in Racket than it used to be, in Racket's Lisp ancestors. I suspect it can be saved for an aside, when introducing syntax transformers ("and here, we can get the form as a list if we want") or maybe "eval" ("this will rock your world: data can be code. you should probably never do this").
Unless someone finds it useful in explaining how evaluation works. I don't have significant experience teaching intro programming, so I tend to defer to PLT professors on what they've found worked for their intro students.
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