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A fundamental distinction in scope is what "part of a program" means. In languages with lexical scope (also called static scope), name resolution depends on the location in the source code and the lexical context (also called static context), which is defined by where the named variable or function is defined.
Local variables may have a lexical or dynamic scope, though lexical (static) scoping is far more common.In lexical scoping (or lexical scope; also called static scoping or static scope), if a variable name's scope is a certain block, then its scope is the program text of the block definition: within that block's text, the variable name exists, and is bound to the variable's value, but outside ...
A somewhat common misconception is that dynamic typing implies dynamic name resolution. For example, Erlang is dynamically typed but has static name resolution. However, static typing does imply static name resolution. Static name resolution catches, at compile time, use of variables that are not in scope; preventing programmer errors.
Dynamic binding (or late binding or virtual binding) is name binding performed as the program is running. [2] An example of a static binding is a direct C function call: the function referenced by the identifier cannot change at runtime. An example of dynamic binding is dynamic dispatch, as in a C++ virtual method call.
The term closure is often used as a synonym for anonymous function, though strictly, an anonymous function is a function literal without a name, while a closure is an instance of a function, a value, whose non-local variables have been bound either to values or to storage locations (depending on the language; see the lexical environment section below).
Local data is also invisible and inaccessible to a called function, [note 1] but is not deallocated, coming back in scope as the execution thread returns to the caller. Automatic local variables primarily applies to recursive lexically-scoped languages.
A prominent characteristic of Emacs Lisp is in its use of dynamic rather than lexical scope by default. That is, a function may reference local variables in the scope it is called from, but not in the scope where it was defined. Recently, there has been an ongoing effort to update code to use lexical scoping, for reasons outlined below.
To understand what a symbol refers to, the Common Lisp programmer must know what kind of reference is being expressed, what kind of scope it uses if it is a variable reference (dynamic versus lexical scope), and also the run-time situation: in what environment is the reference resolved, where was the binding introduced into the environment, et ...