Re: Emacs Lisp and Guile

[Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>]

    When coding-system-for-write would have been designed for Scheme, I
    would expect it to hidden behind an abstraction; it would not be a
    variable that you can set.  It could be offered as

	(with-coding-system-for-write 'foo
	  (lambda () ...))

This approach is unacceptable.  There are hundreds of such variables.
If we had to create several macros-and-functions for each one,
and document them, that would be a gigantic amount of work (which we
cannot afford to do) and would result in a bloated and cumbersome system.

These variables in Lisp must be variables in Scheme as well.

    (with-variable 'coding-system-for-write 'foo
      ...statements...)

That would be feasible, but it is much less clean that handling
coding-system-for-write as a variable.

    works for all variables.  Of course, you might as well call it `let',
    then :-)

Exactly.  We should extend Guile so that its mechanism for handling
variables dynamically is up to the job; then we should use that mechanism
for these variables.