[racket] why do I get undefined , when using internal definition?

Eli Barzilay wrote at 07/10/2011 02:25 AM:
>> it should work as you originally expected, or it should raise an
>> error to complain about an internal "define" referencing itself like
>> that and ignoring the pre-existing binding from the argument.
>>     
>
> An error would be nice, but racket never did that.  Same as `letrec'.
>   

So, I think that this should be an error, given the current semantics:

(define X X)

Maybe that's an extremely simple example of a more general error of 
attempting to evaluate an uninitialized variable.  At least, I think 
that the ones that can be proven statically to always be uninitialized 
references should be compile errors.  Or is there a good reason for the 
compiler to be more liberal?

Separately, I also think that maybe the following should be an error, 
since someone doing this with internal-"define" instead of "let" is most 
likely a student, and a student probably doesn't mean to do this:

(define (foo name)
  (define name ...)
  ...)

-- 
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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