Why doesn't Rebol 3 honor quoted function parameters that are parenthesized?

Question

The DO dialect uses series of category PAREN! for precedence, and will usually boil away the underlying parentheses structure prior to invoking a function.

However,

Answer 1

The behaviour of this argument passing type has been changed on purpose. (Many users including myself requested the change). The advantage is that you can request evaluation for this argument type using parentheses (another way how to request evaluation is to use get-word). If you want truly unevaluated argument passing, see this:

quote: make function! [[
    "Returns the value passed to it without evaluation."
    :value [any-type!]
][
    :value
]]

That is again an improvement compared to R2, where such function does not really behave exactly the same way.

And in case you really want to pass a paren! to your function while not wanting to change its definition to use "truly unevaluated argument passing" you can try this:

non-evaluated (quote (1 + 2))