Re: Basic Design Questions: function cells

["Eric J. Swenson" <Swenson@CISL-SERVICE-MULTICS.ARPA>]

I've gotten several responses (off the record, it appears since they
were not cc'ed to the common-lisp mailing list) which appear to confirm
my feeling that the two-cell approach in considered to be very ugly and
that this decision must have been based on maintaining compatibility
with existing renditions of Lisp.  Another topic, which along similar
veins, appears to hold a consensus is that the multitude of functions
within CL which "only work for global (special) variables and not for
lexically bound variables" and vice-versa is also clumsy in appearance.
Would someone care to explain why it was necessary to devise two-sets of
functions for what (being rather naive, I would think) could have been
combined into one more consistent set?