Re: Making Lua lexically scoped (was: Re: Proper tail recursion)

[ramsdell@... (John D. Ramsdell)]

Reuben Thomas <rrt@dcs.gla.ac.uk> writes:

> This is the heart of the misunderstanding then. The trouble is that
> "lexical scope" means different things to different people. For
> example, in the Dragon Book (Aho, Sethi & Ullman, 1986), the authors
> write "A common rule, called the lexical- or static-scope rule..."
> (p. 411). This is the definition I was using.

I've been trained to think about Algol when determining if a language
is lexically scoped, and that static scope just means the resolution
of variable references to variable bindings can be done a compile with
a static analysis of the program.  The Python people seem to use
lexical scoping as I do, because their language was always statically
scoped, but just recently became lexically scoped.  As your reference
suggest, not everyone agrees with this distinction.

John