So.. let me see if I understand this correctly. Please correct me if I'm wrong. What you are saying is that wart will have lexical scope, just like Arc. But, when a variable does not exist in the lexical scope (it is a global variable), it will then be treated as a dynamic variable, and thus take it from the caller's scope? What about this?
(def bar (x) x)
(def foo (x)
(bar x))
(foo 5) -> returns 5, as expected
(let bar nil
(foo 5)) -> ???
Would the above return 5, or would it treat "bar" as a dynamic variable?
You could work around that by saying that a global variable is only treated as dynamic if it is undefined. In other words, rather than throwing an "undefined variable" error like Racket does, it would instead just grab the value from the caller's scope. That would help a lot, but I predict it would still be somewhat risky.
However, I think there is an inherent benefit/cost tradeoff in all things, and so I suspect that this could actually work out okay in practice. I myself have desired a Lisp where all global variables are dynamic, but I never thought to make all undefined variables dynamic.
My suggestion would be to try it out and see how it works in practice.
