Re: Default lexical-binding to t

[Stefan Monnier]

> It's normal, even here, when introducing possibly breaking changes to
> announce them and deal with objections/bugs/incompatibilities.  For
> example, you did this on introducing line numbers in the display engine.
> This worked very well, in that several bugs got fixed before landing it
> on master.
>
> Maybe this did happen with lexical binding.  If it did, I can't find it.

In our "Evolution of Emacs Lisp" paper we do mention some of the steps
along the way.  Lexical binding in Emacs Lisp dates back to the
"rewrite" of CL back in Emacs-18 which added `lexical-let` and various
other options were discussed, attempted, etc...

Not sure how that's the relevant to the current discussion:

> OK.  But surely somebody, somewhere, had some reservations?

No doubt.  But the other choices just sucked even more.


        Stefan