Re: Surrounding Lexical Variable Reference in the Body of defun

[Stefan Monnier]

>   1. Why does this restriction exists? Is it inevitable because of
>      some design decision of Emacs? Or is it temporary and removed in
>      a (near) future release?

It is because of a technical limitation in the byte-compiler's handling
of dynamically loaded docstrings.

You can work around this by replacing your defun
with (defalias counter (lambda () (setq x (1+ x)))).

I believe this is fixed in the Emacs trunk (where defun is just a macro
that expands to a defalias+lambda and where the docstrings handling was
improved accordingly).


        Stefan