ON THE NEED FOR FEWER RESTRICTIONS IN CHANGING COMPILE-TIME ENVIRONMENTS.

The relaxation of present restrictions on changes in the compile-time environment is proposed in order to encourage the compartmentalization of program information and at the same time to allow efficient code generation. Specifically, it is proposed that a group of declarations can be defined as an environment and that arbitrary pieces of program text can state within which environment they are to be compiled. With such a mechanism, program text can be intermixed by means of macros without having to make the relevant declarations global or having to repeat the declarations in places other than the environment's definition.