Can you show an example? Seems interesting considering that code knowing about external context is not generally a good pattern when it comes to maintainability (security, readability).
I’ve lived through some horrific 10M line coldfusion codebases that embraced this paradigm to death - they were a whole other extreme where you could _write_ variables in the scope of where you were called from!
I can write code like: penguin_sizes <- select(penguins, weight, height)
Here, weight and height are columns inside the dataframe. But I can refer to them as if they were objects in the environment (I., e without quotes) because the select function looks for them inside the penguins dataframe (it's first argument)
This is a very simple example but it's used extensively in some R paradigms
And its why you can do plot(x, sin) and get properly labelled graphs. It also powers the formula API that made caret and glm modules so easy to use.