Proposal #9: Variable Name Conflicts

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

    Date: 28 Jul 86 15:52 PDT
    From: Masinter.pa at Xerox.COM
    I'd like to request that discussion of this proposal be suspended until
    after the question of the scope of declarations gets considered.

    My reason is that one of the primary arguments against duplicate names
    in a binding form is the ambiguity of referent for declarations. Some of
    the proposals for declaration scoping would remove the ambiguity. 

Funny, I was going to suggest exactly the opposite.  I was going to suggest
that we delay the declarations issue until after we decide the scoping
issue.  The two clearly have an interaction, the question is do you want
the crufty rules for declarations to drive the scoping rules, or vice
versa?  My instincts say that the variable scoping rules should be
clarified first, but clearly other people may see things the other way, so
perhaps we can do no better than to continue to deal with them both
simultaneously.