Common Lisp should use lexical scoping

[Steven <Handerson@CMU-CS-C.ARPA>]

I think that the reason for this property (that an environment is created once
and never altered) is so that you can assign positions in a vector to the
variables, for runtime efficiency.  If you have an alist, there's no reason why
you couldn't create a scheme where you could push things onto it etc. and have
it do the right thing.  

For interning symbols, you could probably afford to do a hairy loadtime search
to find where the symbol is, since once you find it, you have this physical
object to refer to.  The package specification would just look something like a
pathname.  Of course, I think one of the problems with packages might be that
adding a variable FOO to a shadowing packages doesn't shadow an already-loaded
symbol.  I dunno.

-- Steve