ERights Home elang / quasi  No Previous Sibling On to: The
Quasi-Literal Expansion  Why Quasi-Literals?  Consider the
ancient C printf and scanf statements:  printf("hello %s
world\n", worldState);  as contrasted with the modern
out.print("hello " + worldState + " world\n");  They both say
approximately the same thing, but the notation of the first is
optimized to make visible the nature of the resulting value:
It'll be like the format string but with the %-holes filled in.
The second form is instead optimized to make visible the nature
of the computation that will produce this value. Unfortunately
for my explanation, the difference doesn't seem to make much
difference on this case.  Though less familiar, the point is
clearer with Lisp's quasi-quote, since it expands to a normal
expression:  `(hello ,worldState world)  which means "A list
whose first element is the literal symbol 'hello, whose second
element is the value of the variable worldState, and whose third
element is the literal symbol 'world." Like