On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 10:18:21AM -0500, Mario Frasca wrote: > this is a result of some help I received a few days ago in the > #emacs irc chat room on freenode. > > I was wondering why we were adding a semicolon in front of names, > before creating symbols, and I understand this is because such > symbols work as keys. I assume you mean a "colon", like this `:' Those :foo thingies have another nice property: they are self-evaluating, like numbers. If you try, e.g. to eval foo, the evaluator tries to find a variable named foo and the result is then that variable's value. If you evaluate 'foo, the result is the symbol foo. If you evaluate :foo, the result is :foo, like when you evaluate 1234, where the result is simply 1234. Cheers -- t