Subject: Re: Common Lisp, the one true religion! From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Mon, 10 Sep 2001 01:08:31 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3209072908163468@naggum.net> * tfb@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) > And yet they feel perfectly comfortable breaking their previous > promises to the compiler, comfortable in the knowledge that they > remember the actual memory layout of the object pointed to, whatever > the compiler might think. But that is so different! A cast says "now I want this to be of type X", not "tell me if this is not used consistently with its declared type", which all the type checking is about. Ironically, a cast is like a type declaration in Common Lisp, which says "you may assume this is of type X". > There are plenty of casts in my C code, but for those people who really > *can't* be trusted to remember the types of their variables, they are > sometimes a source of remarkably difficult to find and fix bugs. I believe the same is true for highly optimized, e.g., (safety 0), Common Lisp code with declarations that are lies. ///