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by dismalaf 20 days 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.
1 comments
trealira 20 days ago
> 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.

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dismalaf 20 days ago
> 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.

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