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5.2.10 Type Restrictions

 

Avoid use of the and, not and satisfies types in declarations, since type inference has problems with them. When these types do appear in a declaration, they are still checked precisely, but the type information is of limited use to the compiler. and types are effective as long as the intersection can be canonicalized to a type that doesn't use and. For example:

(and fixnum unsigned-byte)
is fine, since it is the same as:
(integer 0 most-positive-fixnum)
but this type:
(and symbol (not (member :end)))
will not be fully understood by type interference since the and can't be removed by canonicalization.

Using any of these type specifiers in a type test with typep or typecase is fine, since as tests, these types can be translated into the and macro, the not function or a call to the satisfies predicate.



Raymond Toy
Mon Jul 14 09:11:27 EDT 1997