Re: Quotes around \consists argument?

[Luca Fascione]

On Mon, Apr 25, 2022 at 10:47 AM David Kastrup <dak@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