Correction

[VERACSD@A.ISI.EDU]

     I have to apologize to Symbolics.  Their release 7.1 (possibly also
7.0, but not 6.1) does allow toplevel lexical variables such as described
in my posting earlier today.  The user is asked whether this is really
what he wants.
     I am informed that TI's upcoming release 3.0 will support this too.
     (What I said about the functions not being actually compiled remains
true for 7.1; I'm not sure about 3.0.)
     (I might add that Symbolics does not allow lexical bindings around
defmethods (not sure about TI); I hope they will consider it.)

     A little thought has also revealed to me that there is no way one
can expect the compile function, called at runtime, to pick up lexical
bindings.  The other alternative, putting the let around the second
argument to compile (as part of it) is clearly not supported by CLtL,
although it would be nice if it were.

     Sorry for any inconvenience.

Bob Sasseen