Soft Quoted Branching: Light, Elegant, Fast

[hostilefork]

@hostilefork

It's uncommon to use expressions that evaluate to branches passed to conditionals. And when you do use one, you probably don't mind putting it in a GROUP! (especially considering that 99% of the time in the far more common cases you were willing to put it in a BLOCK!).

So Ren-C now uses that fact--plus generalized quoting--to allow for a briefer and faster way to evaluate to literals in your conditionals:

>> if okay '[block as data]
== [block as data]

So-called "soft-quoted branching" now runs up against the question of quoting's meaning for binding.

Generally we would assume the example above would mean you would get an unbound block (or, more accurately, the block with the binding it has... which is usually nothing if it's source).

This means it's semantically different from:

if okay [[block as data]]

Because there, the block is evaluated... and under that evaluation, receives the current binding.

It would instead be the equivalent of:

if okay ['[block as data]]

We can now consider the potential meaning of:

if okay $[block as data]

This could be the real equivalent of if true [[block as data]].

$ forms aren't available for all types the way quoted forms are, but have the curiously appropriate property (in the current model) that they are available for all bindable types... so we can imagine the meaning of $ branches being "as is, bound".