New Issue: SYNTACTIC-ENVIRONMENT-ACCESS

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

re:  It makes sense to be able to have more than one distinct remote 
     environment around at any given  time; ...
     Does it make any sense to have more than one distinct local 
     environment around, or is there only one?  

Lucid's "retargetable" compiler indeed contains, potentially, dozens 
of encapsulations of "remote environments" as so-called "compiler
machines".  The idea is to cross-compile from an image running on, say,
a Sun3 to targets as diverse as the SPARC and 80386 at essentially
"the same time".  See our paper in the 1986 Lisp Conferences on a
Dynamically Retargetable Compiler.

I had imagined that "local" environment meant the purely syntatic
information directly visible in the s-expression being viewed as
code; e.g., what names appear in a lambda or let binding, what
names appear in declare forms, etc.  Is that more limiting that 
what you had in mind?

I've given eb (Eric Benson) extensive comments on this proposal
verbally, and will not repeat them here.  He is preparing a new
version incorporating the various ideas that have arisen during
the past couple days, and will mail that out shortly.


-- JonL --