About the holy grail quote... I should say it's not about __finding__ such a language, more like it's about __searching__ for such a language. Which involves constantly looking at different ones.
upvars is a terrible idea. You don't want capturing variables from the lexical environment to be something you have to explicitly ask for everytime. If you don't tend to use lexical scope all the time you end up with all sorts of action-at-a-distance bugs.
Newlisp is another language that uses dynamic scope by default. All it does is save a little bit of implementation effort. In every other way it's bad for users.
Interestingly, Mu plays this game as well. In Mu you have to explicitly specify what level variable you mean. But Mu explicitly isn't a high-level language. It's a language for building Lisp compilers in. And all Lisp compilers implement lexical scope under the hood using these tricks.
So what I'm saying is that Tcl is trying to avoid some work related to automatically managing lexical scope, and trying to pass this off as good for programmers.
But these comments of mine aren't as concrete as I usually strive for. I doubt you'll be persuaded by them. Just keep them in mind as you continue your search.
"..it's not about __finding__ such a language, more like it's about __searching__ for such a language. Which involves constantly looking at different ones."
