Functionality of double quotes in a table? a bug?

I have a cell containing:
ch(“somenode/somechan”)-2

if I fetch it like I normally would:
set cell = tabrc($mytable,$somerow,$somecol)
echo $cell

I see:
ch(somenode/somechan)-2

that is, the double quotes are stripped out.
That happens even if I:
set cell = “tabrc($mytable,$somerow,$somecol)

The only way I can get those double quotes through is to put a backslash in front of each when I type the cell’s formula, which is very annoying.

Is there a practical reason why double quotes are treated differently than the rest of the cell’s content?

thanks,
d

try `noevals(tabrc($mytable,$somerow,$somecol))`