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Quote­Delimiter

cowan
2014-12-28 10:32:32
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Survey of implementations to see which treat ' as a delimiter that terminates a symbol:

I tested (list 'a'b) on the usual suite of Schemes.

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

Returned (a'b): Bigloo, Guile, SISC, SCM, Shoe, TinyScheme, Dream, S7, Schemik, Elk, UMB, VX, Sizzle, Dfsch, Inlab

Syntax error: Ikarus, Larceny, Ypsilon, Mosh, IronScheme, SXM, 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.