Lexical Scoping

When our language tries to lookup a variable that has been undefined it throws an error. It would be better if it could tell us which variables are undefined before evaluating the program. This would let us avoid typos and other annoying bugs. Finding these issues before the program is run is called lexical scoping, and uses the rules for variable definition to try and infer which variables are defined and which aren’t at each point in the program, without doing any evaluation.

This could be a difficult task to get exactly right, but should be interesting to anyone who wants to make their programming language safer to use, and less bug-prone.

Static Electricity • A hair-raising alternative.