Think of it this way... Evaluated = "Hey Chief, I want you to send all this text over to Ruby to execute as code".  Text macros are a pure Chief construct and have nothing to do with Ruby unless the macro is set to evaluate, and even then, it's only the code execution that involves Ruby. Non-evaluated = "Hey Chief, I just want you to just use this as dumb text." Anything between % signs is pure Chief and has nothing whatsoever to do with Ruby.  Ruby only sees the text value