Question

What is dynamic scoping in R?

Answer 1

Under dynamic scope, if an “unknown” variable is referred to in a function, the idea is to use the version of the variable that is in scope at the time that the function was called (and apply this rule recursively) – this is the scoping rule used by the S-PLUS implementation of the S language. Dynamic scope was common among early dynamic programming languages – including early implementations of LISP (and is still used in Emacs LISP), as it was quite intuitive and natural to implement using a stack-based approach similar to the stack-based approach to passing variables in and out of subroutines commonly used by machine code and assembly programmers.