10 Evaluation

The evaluation of expressions in Emacs Lisp is performed by the Lisp interpreter—a program that receives a Lisp object as input and computes its value as an expression. How it does this depends on the data type of the object, according to rules described in this chapter. The interpreter runs automatically to evaluate portions of your program, but can also be called explicitly via the Lisp primitive function eval.

• Intro Eval		Evaluation in the scheme of things.
• Forms		How various sorts of objects are evaluated.
• Quoting		Avoiding evaluation (to put constants in the program).
• Backquote		Easier construction of list structure.
• Eval		How to invoke the Lisp interpreter explicitly.
• Deferred Eval		Deferred and lazy evaluation of forms.