Re: Lexical binding -- do we really need it?

[Richard Stallman]

    I think we do.  For one thing, it will helpful if elisp authors start
    thinking about (and optionally using) lexical binding, for surely when
    we replace the elisp interpreter entirely, the new language will use
    lexical scope by default.

I should clear up a possible misunderstanding.  We will never
eliminate Emacs Lisp support from Emacs.  We will never tell all the
users to convert all their Emacs Lisp code to another language.
That would hardly be treating them right.

We want to support Scheme, and we may implement Emacs Lisp by
conversion to Scheme some day.  What makes this goal thinkable is the
possibility of maintaining compatibility for Emacs Lisp.