8
Environments
The environment is the data structure that powers scoping. This chapter dives deep into environments, describing their structure in depth, and using them to improve your understanding of the four scoping rules described in Section 6.2.
Environments can also be useful data structures in their own right because they have reference semantics. When you modify a binding in an environment, the environment is not copied; it’s modified in place. Reference semantics are not often needed, but can be extremely useful.
Quiz
If you can answer the following questions correctly, you already know the most important topics in this chapter. You can find the answers at the end of the chapter in Section 8.6.
- List at least three ways that an environment ...
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