By the current lexical environment I meant the lexical environment at some place in the code (not just the top-level one, which user-initial-environment gives,

By the current lexical environment I meant the lexical environment at some place in the code (not just the top-level one, which user-initial-environment gives, though it's optional). I'm not attempting to make a case for anything; but without that RnRS' eval doesn't grant more expressivity than just tacking on an interpreter to every program, which you could also just do yourself. (It also doesn't complicate the implementation; variable names don't need to be preserved after compiling.) I.e. it makes sense to say standard Scheme has been less "eval-friendly," even if there were good reasons or one doesn't care.