Modifiers like :ratchet are lexically scoped, and therefore extend
into any embedded <?before...> or <?after...>, I think. These days
if you find yourself saying "surrounding context", you should usually
ask yourself whether you mean "lexical" or "dynamic", and that often
indicates the direction I'll be leaning on underspecced issues,
especially if you assume I have a bias towards lexical unless dynamic
is explicitly mentioned.
I supposed it could be argued that the argument to a before or
after is hidden from the outer lexical scope, such as in
<foo("arg")>
but I'd say that even there, the language inside the parens is still
inherited from the surrounding language braid, which is a lexically
scoped concept. The current outermost language is called $~MAIN (see
S02) while the current regex language is called $~Regex. It just
has to look outward a bit further to see what the current definition
of $~MAIN is than it would have to look for $~Regex. But all the ~
twigil variables are working together to define the current lexical
scope's language in an interwoven fashion. Which is why we call
it a "braid" of languages.
Larry
