Binding functions vs packages.

[George J. Carrette <GJC at MIT-MC>]

    From: Richard M. Stallman <RMS at MIT-AI>

    I hear that GJS and HAL have a plan for manipulating "lexical"
    environments in a fashion which is not really syntactically nested,
    and this may solve the problem.  But it is not simply ordinary lexical
    binding of function names.  Anything which is really syntactically
    local does not do the job.

This certainly true in the case of program editing in a
non-structured text-oriented way, but in a system with
more cooperation between program editor and compiler this
need not be the case. I'm all for editing programs as text,
but I don't like representing them, storing them, as
a sequence of characters, i.e. in a purely syntactic manner.
Why? Because it severely limits program management to
purely syntactical levels. 

-gjc