Introducing some changes for improved handling of special variables.

Saving and restoring of individual variables is very silly
and it's making it difficult to implement function parameters
that are rebindings of special variables.

Let's have a global pointer to a dynamic environment called dyn_env.
Let's make it part of the extended_jmp_buf structure, so that it's
implicitly saved and restored across exception handling.

Special variable lookups go through the dyn_env chain, and fall back on
the global bindings.

To override some specials, we just push a new dynamic environment and
stick them there. (As a bonus, the bindings can even be repeated in the
lexical environment (i.e. the same objects), so they can be found
faster. We have to make sure we remove that environment when we
leave the scope in the normal way. If we unwind out, it is done
automatically by extended_longjmp mechanism.

* eval.c (dyn_env): New global variable.
(lookup_var, lookup_var_l): If env is nil, look in the dyn_env
first, and only if that fails, look in the global bindings top_vb.

* signal.h (extended_jmp_buf): New member, de, for saving/restoring
dyn_env. This structure is now used whether or not we have signals.
(extended_setjmp, extended_longjmp): Updated to save and restore
dyn_env, and to do it regardless of whether there is POSIX signal
support.
(dyn_env): Declared here.

1 files changed, 32 insertions, 0 deletions

diff --git a/ChangeLog b/ChangeLog
index b6c1a7e8..d0d52e72 100644
--- a/ChangeLog
+++ b/ChangeLog
@@ -1,3 +1,35 @@
+2014-02-23  Kaz Kylheku  <kaz@kylheku.com>
+
+	Introducing some changes for improved handling of special variables.
+	Saving and restoring of individual variables is very silly
+	and it's making it difficult to implement function parameters
+	that are rebindings of special variables.
+
+	Let's have a global pointer to a dynamic environment called dyn_env.
+	Let's make it part of the extended_jmp_buf structure, so that it's
+	implicitly saved and restored across exception handling.
+
+	Special variable lookups go through the dyn_env chain, and fall back on
+	the global bindings.
+
+	To override some specials, we just push a new dynamic environment and
+	stick them there. (As a bonus, the bindings can even be repeated in the
+	lexical environment (i.e. the same objects), so they can be found
+	faster. We have to make sure we remove that environment when we
+	leave the scope in the normal way. If we unwind out, it is done
+	automatically by extended_longjmp mechanism.
+
+	* eval.c (dyn_env): New global variable.
+	(lookup_var, lookup_var_l): If env is nil, look in the dyn_env
+	first, and only if that fails, look in the global bindings top_vb.
+
+	* signal.h (extended_jmp_buf): New member, de, for saving/restoring
+	dyn_env. This structure is now used whether or not we have signals.
+	(extended_setjmp, extended_longjmp): Updated to save and restore
+	dyn_env, and to do it regardless of whether there is POSIX signal
+	support.
+	(dyn_env): Declared here.
+
 2014-02-22  Kaz Kylheku  <kaz@kylheku.com>
 
 	* eval.c (symbol_function): Retrieve the global macro binding if the