Toplevel lexical variables

[Dan Pierson <pierson@multimax.ARPA>]

Ah, but the original desire (as I understand it) was to have the LET
be top-level rather than nested inside of a DEFUN.  CLtL allows
top-level forms to be nested inside PROGN but not LET.  The use of
top-level LETs is a common, and useful, Scheme idiom.  I suspect that
it was discovered by the Scheme folks first because they've had
lexical scoping longer, but we really should support it in Common
Lisp.

Your definition B followed by:

     (eval-when (load eval) (b))

does the same job at the costs of: an extra function defintion and
call, and considerably more opaque syntax.  I don't believe that it's
any easier to compile properly (i.e. ensure that the internal lambdas
are optionally compiled).

                                            	dan