Re: Variable binding discipline

[Guy.Steele at CMU-10A]

(1) Sorry -- in my description of the proposed scheme I omitted
the description of LOCAL-DECLARE, either out of brevity or laziness.
Indeed, one could use LOCAL-DECLARE to override the default
interpretation of an ordinary variable.
(2) While LABELS *could* be bad for extensibility, it needn't necessarily
be bad (let alone "very bad").  I agree that LABELS ought to be used
sparingly.  One of the reasons for putting it into a real language
is to find out the extent of its usefulness (I think that it has *some*
usefulness is already established).
Often redefinability of functions is what you want.  On the other
hand, when I write REVERSE using REVERSE1, I don't particularly want
REVERSE1 to be redefined.  (Tracing is another matter.)
--Guy