Issue: PROCLAIM-LEXICAL (Version 7)

[Jon L White <jonl@lucid.com>]

re: The KMP/EB discussion suggests that the semantics of the proposal are
    very confusing even to experts, although perhaps it's just unfamiliar.

I agree.  This might be something we shouldn't even think about standard-
izing until some implementor/vendor takes the plunge in a trial balloon, 
presumably based on his belief that these semantics are immensely worthwhile
to Common Lisp users -- so important in fact that he's willing to "run ahead" 
of the X3J13 committee and use it for a couple of years.  Otherwise, without
some practical evidence that there is overwhelming gain to be had, I fear 
we could commit ourselves for an enormous implementational headache purely
because it "seemed like a nice idea at the time".

Yes, I remember, I was mildly in favor of the original proposal; but that 
was a year and a half ago, and I expected a GLOBAL declaration to mean that
it would be illegal to special-bind that name (hence you could depend on
that name *not* being in the D environment).  Had somebody implemented
something like it for their Lisp back then, we might have had results to 
talk about now.

Incidentally, Lucid has done a deep-binding implementation -- for QLISP.
Needless to say, it wasn't an overnight project; and the performance
results could be questioned (or else, we could just commit more good
money after bad to keep tweaking it indefinitely).  Well, anyway, QLISP
*is* a research project.


I think it would be better to drop the notion of dynamic bindings --
SPECIAL variables -- altogether, than to try to graft a hybrid notion
on top of Common Lisp.  There are quite a few folks who really would
like to flush special variables; but that's an issue guaranteed to
cleave the community down the middle.


-- JonL --