a historical inquiry

[Guy Steele <gls@think.com>]

    Date: Thu, 5 Feb 87 10:30:25 pst
    From: Gregory Weeks <hplb29a!hplbgw!weeks@hplabs.hp.com>

    Could someone tell me what motivated people to include special variables in
    Common Lisp?  Was there any dispute at the time?  I'm NOT trying to start a
    discussion; I'm just curious.

Given the state of Lisp practice at the time, better yet you should
ask "What motivated people to include any kind of variable OTHER
than special variables?"  (Recall that SCHEME was not nearly as
popular then as now, and nearly every other Lisp used only dynamic
binding in the interpreter and dynamic and local binding in
compiled code.)

--Guy