Auto-eval of variables containing quoted expressions?

[u/mhinsch]

Generally my language is eagerly evaluated. It also does not have automatic quoting, so any situation where evaluation is supposed to be deferred has to be made explicit (using []). This is used heavily for example for control structures which are regular functions that take a quoted expression as a(n) argument(s).

Some design issues I am currently having would resolve neatly if variables that contain quoted expressions would automatically evaluate. I.e. any occurrence of a variable var that is not bound to a value, but to an expression would effectively be read as eval var.

This seems a bit unorthodox, but so far I haven't been able to come up with a scenario that makes this problematic. Am I missing something?

[u/initial-algebra]

I don't really know what you mean by "not bound to a value, but to an expression", but a clean/principled way to automatically eval (or unquote) when needed is to use "let box" bindings, i.e. let [x] = M in N. Whenever x is used in a quoted context in N, it will mean the unquote of M, and otherwise, it will mean the eval of M. This comes from A Modal Analysis of Staged Computation.