Yes, I think the explanation in the manual — despite quite a bit of revising over the years — is still not ideal. Overall, I think too much has been made of the hard- vs. soft-scope distinction. The way I think about it is that once you are inside a scope that can have local variables (e.g. let, for, or a function), everything follows very simple lexical scope rules: all variables and declarations are inherited by inner scopes. Things are only weird in the very first transition from global to local scope. That’s the only place “hardness” matters: for some forms (e.g. functions), we’ll always introduce new locals by default, and for others “it depends”. But once inside the comfort of a local scope, you don’t need to know which scopes are “hard”; they all behave the same — or at least they should!! Any exceptions will be entertained as bug reports.
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