REIFY vs. META vs. SOMETHING

[hostilefork]

@hostilefork

An operator that leaves non-antiforms as they are, but turns antiforms into their plain forms:

>> true
== ~true~  ; isotope

>> something true
== true

>> something 10
== 10

@hostilefork

It could be a refinement to REIFY, like REIFY/PLAIN. But at that point it could be two steps that might be clearer: NOQUASI REIFY, where NOQUASI would be like NOQUOTE and not complain if the thing you passed it was not a quasiform.

I think (noquasi reify ...) and (reify/noquasi ...) (soon to be reify:noquasi) are probably about as good as this gets.

One argument against providing both is that it's cleaner. Another is that a function with one argument and no refinements can be an intrinsic. So having just noquasi reify would be faster than path (chain) dispatch, as well as speed up all REIFY operations.

@hostilefork

Maybe... CONCRETIZE? That sounds like it might do a bit more work than what REIFY does :-/

@hostilefork

It's not awful. A shorter word would be CONCRETE.

No one will know what that means. If you're in a script where you're saying noquasi reify over and over so often it's creating problems you can define it however you like (nqr: get $noquasi/reify)

Maybe not everything needs a single word.

When you’re about to defenestrate French...