Get the latest tech news

Quirks of Common Lisp Types

able of Contents "But I need types," he told me. Humans have a tendency toward binary thinking (pardon the pun).

Our years of Python have taught us that such languages don't really have strong typing - it's all a wild guess until the interpreter calls foo on a and b and we find out who everyone really is. In Common Lisp, if the word "type" corresponds to a "compatibility family", then "class" is what the data value is actually implemented as internally. Recall that like Haskell, struct/class field access is all done through typed functions (not foo.bar calls), and the concept of "method" exists but is different in a nice way.

Get the Android app