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Message: [QUOTE="Shriram Krishnamurthi, post: 1729429"] I'm sorry -- you appear to be hopelessly confused on this point. I can't comment on the dark corners of Common Lisp, but I do know all of those corners of Scheme. Scheme is a true call-by-value language. There are no functions in Scheme whose arguments are not evaluated. Indeed, neithen a function definition, nor an argument location, has the freedom to "not evaluate" an argument. We can reason about this quite easily: the language provides no such syntactic annotation, and the evaluator (as you might imagine) does not randomly make such a choice. Therefore, it can't happen. It is possible that you had a horribly confused, and therefore confusing, Scheme instructor or text. Again, you're confused. SET, SETQ, etc are not primarily binding operators but rather mutation operators. The mutation of identifiers and the mutation of values are fundamentally different concepts. Shriram [/QUOTE]