If you're considering Lisp, you might take a look at Goo -- it's an OO, lexically-scoped Lisp dialect designed by Jonathan Bachrach, who (IIRC) was one of the core implementers of the Apple Dylan compiler and runtime. The compiler actually generates C code, which is compiled and loaded at runtime by calling into libgcc to generate shared objects from the generated sources and then dynamically loading the .so. Lennon