Common LISP: the language
A Scheme for the Automatic Inference of Variable Types
Journal of the ACM (JACM)
Type checking in an imperfect world
POPL '79 Proceedings of the 6th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages
LFP '84 Proceedings of the 1984 ACM Symposium on LISP and functional programming
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While the combination of dynamic typing and generic functions in Lisp have always presented a challenge to optimizing Lisp compilers for stock hardware, the situation has never been more difficult than in Common Lisp [7]. For example, one may add any of eight distinct primitive types of numbers in any combination using the single function+. While the overhead of sorting this type information out at run-time may be largely alleviated by the use of special-purpose hardware or microcode, the problem remains critical for implementations running on conventional general-purpose computers. Indeed, this situation played a crucial role in at least one wide-ranging critique of Common Lisp [2].