Bawden's Alternate Proposal

[Alan Bawden <ALAN@AI.AI.MIT.EDU>]

    Date: Tue, 22 Jul 86 15:36 EDT
    From: Daniel L. Weinreb <DLW at QUABBIN>
    ...
    However, I am not completely happy with this as a philosophy for the
    language.  After all, we have a whole set of scoping rules designed to
    deal with things like:
      (let ((a ---))
        ...
        (let ((a ---))
          ...))

SPECIAL declarations already have this problem.  If at toplevel you do
(PROCLAIM '(SPECIAL A)), then you are restricted in the way you can choose
the names of your lexical variables.  Which is exactly the reason we
generally spell special variables with *'s.

Sure, this isn't a perfect solution.  But I am coming to prefer it to the
existing situation.

    While you're at it, you could simplify the scoping rules as well, by simply
    not allowing such constructs; the user can always change the name of the
    inner "a".

I don't understand what this has to do with it.  I don't see why anyone
would generalize my suggestion to such a restriction.