> Lisp has an extremely strong type system for values (in fact every value is a ... | Hacker News

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manoDev on Oct 13, 2016 | parent | context | favorite | on: Static types in Python

> Lisp has an extremely strong type system for values (in fact every value is a structure that includes a tag that says its primary type)

Out of curiosity: if I'm not mistaken, this was an implementation detail of LISP machines [1], and allowed bytecode-level optimizations.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tagged_architecture

krylon on Oct 14, 2016 [–]

I vaguely remember reading that this did not originate on Lisp machines, but they supported this at the hardware level, making it a lot faster. (Like I said: "vaguely"! This is third- to fourth-hand knowledge, at best.)

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