[e-lang] Re: [ANN] E-on-Common-Lisp now available

[Kevin Reid]

On Apr 19, 2005, at 11:41, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
> On Tue, 2005-04-19 at 10:19 -0400, Mark Miller wrote:
>> The above is a rather generic formula. The specific steps that would 
>> I suspect
>> would cause the most hair pulling among Common Lispers:
>> ...
> Another issue: dynamically scoped variables are a mess.

There is nothing *inherently* wrong with dynamic variables (or rather, 
symbol-values) themselves - rather it is the package system and reader 
which distribute shared references to them to anything that asks.

A symbol with its symbol-value is itself no more than a Slot.

One solution would be to separate dynamic-Slots from symbols. Each of 
the mutable attributes of symbols (i.e. all of them besides their name) 
would be removed, and kept in local maps keyed on the symbols.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/t_symbol.htm

-- 
Kevin Reid                            <http://homepage.mac.com/kpreid/>