I've talked with David Brown about this and read about it in "Lisp In Small Pieces" but it still bugs me.
A symbol is an object that may or may not be bound to another object. IIRC Dave said the *binding* is synonymous with a variable. "Lisp In Small Pieces" says that a symbol is a syntactic concept and a variable is a semantic concept....which didn't help much. I intuitively want the variable to be associated with the symbol moreso than that. Can I just always substitute "bound symbol" for "variable" everywhere? I wish the term "variable" would just go away but Sussman, et al use it in R5RS a lot so I can't ignore it. The idea of a *bound symbol* is clear enough to me. Chris -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
