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Comment by Jtsummers | Hacker News Reader

> No, Common Lisp was not Lexical from day one.

The first edition of Common Lisp the Language defined the language as having lexical scope, with the option to create special variables with dynamic scope (so it had both). Unless you're referring to some earlier draft specification, it's hard to reconcile your assertion with the history of the language.

From page 39:

> - Variable bindings normally have lexical scope and indefinite extent.

> - Variable bindings that are declared to be special have dynamic scope (indefinite scope and dynamic extent).

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OK, Common Lisp as described by the standardization process has always had lexical scoping, no argument there. Lisp, including the variants of Lisp that CL was largely derived from, did not always have lexical scoping.

So what you are saying is a lot like if I said "C++11 has ALWAYS had the auto keyword!". While I ignore the fact that C++ did not always have the auto keyword, and the repeated typing of the same type signature over and over was a major complaint about the language for over 20 years. Yes, it's true, but it's just ignoring reality and not informative to the overall point I was making, which was Lisp is clearly not designed to make lexical scoping 'nice', because lisp predates the use of lexical scope being the dominant way to do scoping. You can see that in the very conception of scheme, originally designed to be "Lisp but with lexical scoping".

Edit: corrected responding to the wrong person. For the record "Jtsummers" and "iLemming" do look quite a bit more alike than two random usernames!

> You are ignoring the part where you don't actually know Common Lisp and write nonsense code.

Read the usernames, "Jtsummers" and "iLemming" don't even look alike.

I'll write a second reply, I don't normally do this but you completely edited your comment.

> Lisp, including the variants of Lisp that CL was largely derived from, did not always have lexical scoping.

Correct, but you specifically wrote about Common Lisp, thus my reply about Common Lisp, not Lisp (the historical category of languages or the older language definitions which used dynamic scoping rules).

>> No, Common Lisp was not Lexical from day one.

You were very explicit about the language version you were speaking about, as was I in my reply.

> For the record "Jtsummers" and "iLemming" do look quite a bit more alike than two random usernames!

Great. Arguing about "readability" with a dyslexic person. What could ever go wrong here?

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