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Quote­Delimiter

cowan
2012-05-17 03:40:23
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Survey of implementations to see which treat ' as a delimiter that terminates a symbol:

I tested (list 'a'b) on 42 Schemes.

Returned (a b): Racket, Gauche, MIT, Gambit, Chicken, Scheme48/scsh, Kawa, Chibi, Chez, Vicare, NexJ, STklos, KSi, SigScheme, Scheme 9, BDC, XLisp, Rep, Oaklisp, Spark, Owl Lisp

Returned (a'b): Bigloo, Guile, SISC, SCM, Shoe, TinyScheme, Dream, Scheme 7, Schemik, Elk, UMB, VX, Sizzle, Inlab

Syntax error: Vicare, Ikarus, Mosh, IronScheme, SXI, MScheme

I suspect that a lot of implementations think it's simplest to just gobble up what they see until they get to an unquestioned delimiter.