By the way, I think Arc also needs aliases. I know of at least two ways to make aliases: hard and soft. A hard alias is simply having two different symbols refer to the same box.
A soft alias is like a symlink: a new box that points to the other box. The way that I handled this in Nulan is to have &get and &set methods on each box.
These methods are expanded at compile-time like macros, but rather than expanding when the box is the first element of the list, it expands whenever the box isn't the first element of the list.
Translating it into Arc, it might look like this:
(var foo 1)
(defget bar ()
`foo)
(defset bar (x)
`(= foo ,x))
Now whenever the compiler sees the box "bar" it will replace it with the box "foo", and when assigning to the box "bar", it will replace it with an assignment to the box "foo".
Nulan uses this not only to link variables together, but also for other purposes. For instance, assuming there was a function "get-cwd" and "set-cwd", you could do this:
And now `cwd` would expand to `(get-cwd)` and `(= cwd 1)` would expand to `(set-cwd 1)`.
The reason I mention this here is that the namespace macros (w/exclude, w/rename, and w/include) should probably use hard aliases rather than using "var".
