Re: Symbol vs. Value Question

[tomas]

On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 09:07:32AM -0600, Robert A. Uhl wrote:
> On Fri, Oct 19, 2001 at 07:42:33AM +0200, address@hidden wrote:
> > 
> > Hmmm. It looks as if you are passing the symbols. Thus you get
> > the symbols. Try not quoting the list, i.e. say for example
> > 
> >   (trav-mapobject-set-owner (list planet asteroid))
> 
> Yep--that's exactly what the problem was.
> 
> > Note that in Lisp and its daughters there is more distance between
> > a symbol and its binding(s) than we mght be accustomed to :-)
> 
> Well, I'd figured roughly what was going on.  I'm supposing that the
> (list ...) method is more usual and appropriate than the '(...)
> method?
> 

Well -- they are different things; '(...) gives you a list of symbols,
which *might* be bound to other useful things (the bindings depending
on the module). (list ...) gives you a list of the objects passed in
as parameters.

> That said, is there a good way in guile to grab the value of a symbol?

See the answer of Marius to your other post for that. It seems to be
something people far more capable than me like to avoid ;-)

> Like I said, I was reading source and header files late into the night
> and had no luck.  But perhaps I was looking in the wrong direction.
> 

That seems to be one of the hurdles of lispy languages. They have a very
strong culture and it takes a while for a foreigner to build up the right
``expectation set''.

Regards
-- tomas