Re: History of lexical scope in Lisp

Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid> writes:

Is it really true that Common Lisp had both lexical and dynamic scope
in order to support older code that was written relying on dynamic
scope and was too hard to convert?

No.  I'd say Common Lisp has both lexical and dynamic scope because both
are very useful.  For instance, the Guice dependency injection framework
for Java implements @RequestScoped settings, which are dynamically
scoped and thread local.  Guice wouldn't need that feature if Java
natively supported dynamically-scoped variables.