Re: translators and scoping rules (was: Re: language translator help)

[John W. Eaton]

On 28-Apr-2002, Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> wrote:

| "John W. Eaton" <address@hidden> writes:
| 
| > How would you use eval to introduce a new local variable?
| 
| You can't.  If Octave needs this feature (but why?),

Good question.  I can't think of a really legitimate use, but it is
possible to do this in Octave/Matlab, so I was wondering whether it
could be emulated directly in Scheme.

| you can not use
| Scheme's local variables for Octaves local variables.

OK.  I'm not sure whether this feature is really necessary, but it
might also turn out to be a mistake to design the translator in way
that makes it impossible.  Even if I don't want to support this
feature in Octave, someone may want to try to create a completely
bug-for-bug Matlab-compatible translator based on the Octave
translator translator.  We should probably not make that unnecessarily
hard to do.

jwe