From: Gabriele Farina
Subject: [NEWBIE] Quoting
Date: 
Message-ID: <iBtQb.138411$VW.5589409@news3.tin.it>
Hi guys, I just started using lisp because I have tu understand how does 
it works to build an interpreter for CommonLisp to be used with a Game 
Engine.

I got a loto of questions that I have to ask to you, but I just started 
with the one I think it's the most important: how does quoting works?? 
What's its functionality? Quoted objects and strings can be used the same?

I need a good explanation, because I din't understand wuoting when I 
read lisp documentation.

Any one can give me some useful links about lisp??

tnx a lot, bye

From: Pascal Costanza
Subject: Re: [NEWBIE] Quoting
Date: 
Message-ID: <butqd4$1b2$1@newsreader2.netcologne.de>
Gabriele Farina wrote:

> Hi guys, I just started using lisp because I have tu understand how does 
> it works to build an interpreter for CommonLisp to be used with a Game 
> Engine.
> 
> I got a loto of questions that I have to ask to you, but I just started 
> with the one I think it's the most important: how does quoting works?? 
> What's its functionality? Quoted objects and strings can be used the same?
> 
> I need a good explanation, because I din't understand wuoting when I 
> read lisp documentation.
> 
> Any one can give me some useful links about lisp??

That's a very basic question, so it's probably better for you to pick a 
Lisp tutorial and try to learn from that first. All people could do here 
is essentially repeat stuff from such tutorials. You can find some at 
http://www.cliki.net/Education


Pascal

-- 
Tyler: "How's that working out for you?"
Jack: "Great."
Tyler: "Keep it up, then."
From: Joe Marshall
Subject: Re: [NEWBIE] Quoting
Date: 
Message-ID: <n08aiq9d.fsf@ccs.neu.edu>
Gabriele Farina <········@email.it> writes:

> Hi guys, I just started using lisp because I have tu understand how
> does it works to build an interpreter for CommonLisp to be used with a
> Game Engine.
>
> I got a loto of questions that I have to ask to you, but I just
> started with the one I think it's the most important:  how does quoting
> works?? What's its functionality? Quoted objects and strings can be
> used the same?

Every computer language supplies some primitive objects to
manipulate.  Things like numbers, strings, characters, arrays,
structures, etc.  In Lisp, one of the most popular objects is a list
of items.  You might, for example, have a list of polygons to render.
Each polygon might have a list of vertices.

In some languages, you can manipulate the language code itself.  In
many languages, the code is represented as an array of strings where
each string is a line of code.  In Lisp, though, we do things a bit
different --- the code is represented as lists.

Now suppose we want to, for example, print something.  We might write
this: 

  (print (+ 2 3))

This will print the number 5.

But what if we want to print a list of three items, the plus, the 2
and the 3?  The program can't read our minds, so we use quote:

  (print '(+ 2 3))

The quote mark indicates that following list isn't code, but rather
just some list structure that we want to use that may or may not
*look* like code.

You need the quote even if the list structure *doesn't* look like
code:

  (print '(obviously not code))

because if you don't use the quote, the computer will try to apply the
function OBVIOUSLY to the arguments NOT and CODE.