Q: What is the story with this unquote?

If I write:

(assume x (mem (lambda (i)
(flip theta_x))))

[define observer
(lambda (i xi)
(observe (x (unquote i)) xi))]


it works, but if I omit the unquote I get an error when calling (observer 1 True), giving VentureException: *** evaluation: Cannot find symbol 'i'

A: This has to do with there being two distinct “contexts” where expressions may be interpreted: the toplevel (inference) language, and the model. You can think of these as being totally separate; they actually have different interpreters.

Normally if you just type an expression in, like (normal 0 1), it gets evaluated in the inference language. However, so-called “modeling directives” assume, observe, etc, operate on the model.

The confusing part is that what actually happens when you do (observe (x i) xi), is that the expression (x i) is automatically quoted – that is, treated as an expression that is handed to observe (which evaluates it in the model context), rather than evaluated immediately in the inference context.

Actually, it’s _quasi_quoted, which means that, while it is an expression, you can still get things from the inference language into it by using unquote, which you can think of as expression interpolation (sort of like string interpolation).

So you have this local variable i, which lives in the inference language, and what you want is to construct an expression (x ${the value of i}) and that is the thing whose result you want to observe. So you use (unquote i) to do that. If you instead just did (x i), that would treat i as a variable in the model, which would only work if that variable was previously defined in the model (such as by assume). If you like, you can sort of think of it as running this on the command line: python -c "$foo"


versus:

python -c "foo"


In the first case there is a variable in the outer context that is being spliced into the expression in the inner language; in the second case there is just a symbol, which is interpreted as a variable reference in the inner lnaguage.

Q: Why is the venture console ignoring the --abstract-syntax flag when reading a file written in the abstract syntax?

For instance:

$cat foo.vnts (assume earth_radius 6378)$ venture --abstract-syntax -f foo.vnts
Tracing models with the Lite backend
Traceback (most recent call last):
venture.exception.VentureException: *** text_parse: Syntax error at 'earth_radius' (token 2)