Curious bash evaluation

[Chris Tyler]

On Mon, 2010-12-27 at 17:05 +0100, Rodolfo Alcazar Portillo wrote:
> Hello. See this:
> 
> # A="echo 'hi'"
> 
> # echo $($A)
> 'hi'
> 
> # echo 'hi'
> hi
> 
> Does anyone understand why does the first command 
> evals the echo but echoes the simple quotes? 

$() provides a type of quoting, so it's evaluated similar to:

   "echo" "'hi'"

which produces the observed result.

-Chris