


> Date: Mon, 23 Jan 89 23:25:50 GMT
> From: Jeff Dalton <jeff%aiai.edinburgh.ac.uk@NSS.Cs.Ucl.AC.UK>
> The problem with your position is that it would not let me have
> a free local lexical declaration if there were a lexical proclamation
> -- or would it?  The ammendment made at the meeting was to make local
> special declaraions illegal in that case.

It does seem reasonable that free lexical declarations should just be
no-ops in the presence of a lexical proclamation, but you're right
that the amendment I suggested doesn't allow for that.  But I'm not
firmly wedded to that particular language.  To repeat what I said
before, my sense from talking to various people between sessions at
the meeting was that the intent of the other amendment was to
guarantee that you'd never be able to reference the global value of a
variable when there's a special binding, but that not everybody was
aware that that amendment didn't actually guarantee what it was
supposed to.  Basically, in proposing my amendment, I was just being
obstructionist :-) and trying to prevent taking a vote that we'd end
up regretting once we had time to think about its implications. 

I am rather lukewarm on this whole issue.  I like the intent of the
latest round of amendments better than the existing proposal, but I'd
be just as happy to leave this feature out of the standard entirely
for now -- it doesn't appear to represent "current practice" and users
seem to have been getting along OK without it.