Comment by dismalaf
1 day ago
> Lisp is dynamically typed.
Ish.
SBCL aggressively infers types wherever possible. It can do dynamic typing with tags of course. You can also write it with 100% static types.
Dynamic typing isn't a defining feature of Lisp style languages (even GC isn't necessary). Some historic Lisps and modern ones are 100% statically typed.
> even GC isn't necessary
Um, isn't it? Don't all Lisp variants have it? IIRC McCarthy's LISP just ran out of memory until the GC was written.
> Um, isn't it?
No. There's been GC-less Lisp's over the years, here's a good paper on one: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/142137.142162
There was also pre-Scheme, GOAL, nowadays there's Carp and Dale. Zeta Lisp (and now SBCL) had/have arenas and you can manually allocate, etc...
> McCarthy's LISP
McCarthy also envisioned it having M-expressions.