Re: Is there ever a good reason to create globals in Lisp?

[Christopher S. <cs...@dt...>]

Global variables are used as the simplest implementation of the "singleton pattern".
People use them often for bootstrapping, as a database, fixed enumerations, etc.
There is no need to fetishly implement a superfluous container (such as a class instance,
whose pointer you need to pass around) for things like that, when you could just
as easily refer to the plist or hash table  *global-reasons-for-global-variables*.

A related concept you should look into are "special" variables, which have different scope.

You should read these:

http://www.flownet.com/ron/specials.pdf
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/variables.html