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Comment by fusiongyro | Hacker News Reader

I agree, but just because I'm curious, what did Appel say? Different dialects of Lisp have had different scoping rules, but beyond that I don't know what is true or false. I believe earlier ones were dynamically scoped, because I vaguely recollect that lexical scoping was an important change in Common Lisp and Scheme. Of course Common Lisp has a special way to ask for dynamic scope.

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Can't find the quote I was remembering, but it said that Lisp didn't had lexical scope. The book was published in '92, so Lisp already had lexical scope. (Which was introduced by Scheme IIRC)

Here is another one I found looking for the quote I was remembering.

> "It has higher-order functions, meaning that a function can be passed as an argument and return as the result of another function – as in Scheme, C and Haskell, but not Pascal and Lisp.

Wow. Well, at one time, maybe Lisp did not have that? It certainly did by the time this book was written though.

"Lisp" still hasn't; it is a family which comprises various dialects, many of which have lexical scoping, but some of which don't, like Emacs Lisp (which only had dynamic binding until recently and now supports lexical scoping, but not by default).

My comment was directed at the quote about higher-order functions, which is a more legitimately surprising thing than something about scope. And of course we're talking about whatever would have been considered "Lisp" by Appel in 1992, even though you and I might know better and be more precise today.

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