Re: %assign

[haahr@mv.us.adobe.com (Paul Haahr)]

Erik W Quanstrom writes
> Is there any special reason why 
> ; fu = bar
> is not rewritten as 
> %assign fu bar

Alan Watson writes
> I was thinking about %equals and %dollar earlier today, as hooks into
> "foo = bar" and "$foo".  We have flexibility in execution, why not 
> flexibility in data?

the answer to both questions is lexical scoping.  at least with es's
current organization, you couldn't assign or look up lexically scoped
variables with primitives.  to make that work, i think es would need
first class environments, which are not impossible, but not a 1.0
feature.

paul