Does function evaluation depend on place where it is defined?

Question

I get an error message from rtags module while trying to call rtags-taglist.

While edebugging it I didn't find any problem with this function, although of course debugger printed the same error as during regular invocation. As next step, I copied the whole rtags-taglist defun to *scratch* and evaluated it there (C-x C-e). Problem DISAPPEARS then.

So I decided to delete all the *.elc files from the /usr/local/share/emacs/site-lisp/rtags/ directory, then restarted Emacs, then visited the rtags-tagslist definition, then re-evaluated it from its original location (rtags.el), but this DOES NOT solve the problem. Only copying the function definition elsewhere (*scratch*) helps.

How to explain it?

It's weird to me.

I'm running Emacs 24.5, with Spacemacs.

Answer 1

The rtags.el file starts thus:

;;; rtags.el --- A front-end for rtags -*- lexical-binding: t -*-

So maybe the problem appears with lexical rather than the default dynamic binding.