Version 4 of Quoting Heaven!

Updated 2004-10-27 14:04:28

(started by TV)

To counter the notion 'quoting is bad' or 'quoting will make you go to hell' and other such non-sense, I thought it would be a good idea, also in the face of determining theoretical considerations and practical requests for quoting related issues from the positive side of things, so why one wants quoting, and of course how far we have to be denied sugar candy heaven lookalikes and how for excuses can go for people to claim their heaven to be to be as obnoxious or obscure about their programming games as they can, in this case in syntactic or grammar sense related to quoting.


I think I like the idea behind this page; but was the above babel-fished from Dutch (or Klingon)? How about some punctuation heaven?

What is this 'heaven to be', and why would people be claiming it to be obnoxious or obscure?


Maybe remarks can be freely moved in between heaven or hell pages according to good public gouvernment ruling...

The Main Reasons for quoting are, or have to do with, without much question:

  • substitution
  • evaluation
  • grouping of segments of data or programs

The simplest forms:

 set literalWord {a b c}
 set substitutedWord "a b c"

Less Obvious or Advanced Reasons for quoting probably include:

  • syntax analysis
  • constructing of program pieces, like in -command Tk options
  • mathematical or other symbolic manipulations
  • advanced list manipulation

Why 'heaven' ? well, because of tcl being based on interpreted strings and lists, the programmer is fairly free to do what he wants while dealing with the main things that make up programs: characters and their interpretation.

Of course there are, for some liberal, for some conservative, rules to behold this freedom, such as when one can solve programming problems in a neat way, don't go to (quoting or other) hell and don't send the readers or maintainers of your coding efforts there unless you think that is right.

When messing about with C strings, or as in another well known interpreted language, Basic strings and commands, one easily missed the few extra quotes or backslashes a tcl-er can use in his evaled statements, to make them reach over more levels of interpretation, such as also known in the Lisp area.