There are a couple of symbols the emacs‘ lisp interpreter gives special meaning to. Since for some reason these never made it into my long-term memory I collect them here for later reference. Quotes are copied from all over the internet (mostly from GNU Emacs Lisp reference). A reference is given in the last column.
| Symbol | Meaning | Reference |
|---|---|---|
| # | The sharp quote (or function quote puttygen download , or simply #‘) is an abbreviation for the function form. It is essentially a version of quote (or ‚) which enables byte-compilation, but its actual usefulness has changed throughout the years. | reference |
| ` | Backquote constructs allow you to quote a list, but selectively evaluate elements of that list. | reference |
| : | A symbol whose name starts with a colon (‘:’) is called a keyword symbol. These symbols automatically act as constants, and are normally used only by comparing an unknown symbol with a few specific alternatives. | reference |
| , | Unquotes expressions in backquote-constructs. | reference |
| ' | Prevents its single argument from beeing evaluated | reference |
| ? | Introduces a „character literal“ (eg ?a). Evaluates to the printed representation of the character. | reference |
|
,@ |
Splice an evaluated value into a list | reference |
| ; | Introduces a comment. | reference |
In your list, you state that , prevents the argument from being evaluated. I think you actually meant to type ‚
Also, you might want to include ? and ,@ in the list.
Thanks for the hint. WordPress substitutes my apostrophe with another character, but using html entity works.
I have never ever encountered ? and ,@ if you give me some pointers I like to include them!
,@ is often used in macros which accept &rest argument. For example, from subr.el:
(defmacro ignore-errors (&rest body)
„Execute BODY; if an error occurs, return nil.
`(condition-case nil (progn ,@body) (error nil)))
It’s documented at the same page as backquotes are.
And ; is missing 🙂