note 68005 deleted from language.exceptions by bjori

Note Submitter: tatarynowicz at gmail dot com ---- Carlos Konstanski: You can't directly extract previous lexical environment in non-functional languages. What you probably _can_ do is to create a function that dumps the current lexical environment (to an external file or to stdout) and then use it to recreate past states. function log_lex ($vars, $functions) { $f = fopen('lex_env.log', 'a'); fwrite($f, serialize(array($vars, $functions, get_defined_constants(), debug_backtrace())); fclose($f); } log_lex (get_defined_vars(), get_defined_functions()); Writing the parser/browser for dumps is the difficult part. Then just sprinkle the code with log_lex() and see how the program runs. Sure, it works better in Lisp, but Lisp isn't supported on the webservers I work with, and making PHP more like Lisp would probably make it as popular as Lisp is.