Just wanted to know, in fact, how high on the priority list is "compiling to standalone executables"? I already like Arc enough to prefer it over CL and Scheme, but I'd like a foreign function interface (a simple one, if that's not an oxymoron) and the ability to produce executables with something like (compile 'main "MyArcProgram").

Quick and dirty is good, but possibly the most influential programming language in the good old MS-DOS days was Turbo Pascal, which was quick and dirty AND produced .COM (and later .EXE) executable files.