I think you should have to quote them. Like how you have to quote lists:
'(foo bar)
is just a list, but
(foo bar)
will either call the function foo or error if it doesn't exist.
So in a similar way
{foo "bar"}
should give a syntax error, but maybe it can have some kind of semantic meaning later. I've been considering that square brackets could be used for assignment/local binding, to cut down on the need for LET (not necessarily in arc just in lisp in general).
I don't agree. quoting a list is a way to protect the expression from evaluation, in this case because round brackets normally indicate an expression that needs to be called. A table literal {...} doesn't need protection from evaluation as a callable expression as it's just data and like any other data it should evaluate to itself. And, frankly, it would really suck having to protect that data everywhere in my code because someone wants a really nuanced use case to work.
Really what should happen is that [] should be implemented such that we don't need to protect lists of data.
