Re: why not "stripes" in: (let ((zebra 'stripes) ... ; strings vs symbols?

[Rustom Mody <rustompmody@gmail.com>]

 On Sunday, December 29, 2013 7:53:32 PM UTC+5:30, Gregor Zattler wrote:
> Dear emacsophiles,

> ATM i read "An Introduction to Programming in Emacs Lisp".  In
> the section where the let function is explained in detail the
> author, Robert J. Chassell, uses this "silly" example:

>      (let ((zebra 'stripes)
>            (tiger 'fierce))
>        (message "One kind of animal has %s and another is %s."
>                 zebra tiger))

> which when evaluated produces "One kind of animal has stripes and
> another is fierce." as output.

> The thing which makes me wonder is why he uses   'stripes   instead
> of "stripes" in this example.  In the output of the message
> function it makes no difference but to me it seems more natural
> to use strings here since they are part of a string in the output...

> I do not really understand how the   'stripes   are different
> to   "stripes".  Isn't   'stripes   a notation for the symbol
> stripes?   This would mean there is the notion of a symbol which
> is bound to noting?

> Could somebody please enlighten me as to what the differences
> between "stripes" and 'stripes are

> and

> in which cases which notation is more useful/natural?

 In http://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html Eric Raymond says:

 LISP is worth learning for a different reason — the profound
 enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it. That
 experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your
 days, even if you never actually use LISP itself a lot.

 So...
 You are almost there... at the Zen of Lisp!
 And getting lisp symbols is an important part of that

 Lisp is a completely bizarre language because unlike most others its
 primary data structure -- S-exp -- is identical to that used for (lisp) code.

 Very key to that is that symbols do double duty
 - they are variables like in other languages
 - they are data like strings in other languages

 For more on this look up homoiconicity
 Also Ive a blog post on that
http://blog.languager.org/2013/08/applying-si-on-sicp.html
 But for that you need to know scheme