If I understood @vaporware correctly, normal parentheses in ZIL are very similar to the quote form in Scheme. From what I’ve seen, though, they seem a lot more common in ZIL than quote invocations are in Scheme. Hopefully, more code examples will clarify why this is the case.
tangent regarding Scheme
I suppose modern Scheme makes less use of the “code as data” paradigm than previous Lisps anyway, with the traditional form of eval being fundamentally incompatible with lexical scoping, and with “defmacro Schemes” being phased out in favor of R5RS’s annoyingly limited macro system (and, later on, R6RS’s aggravatingly complicated one).
Thinking about this has led me to another technical question for the technical advisor: is ZIL a single-namespace or dual-namespace Lisp?
(Also, integers are called “fixes” because they’re handled with fixed-precision integer arithmetic, right?)