merits of Lisp vs Python

[Paul Rubin]

Neil Cerutti <horpner at yahoo.com> writes:
> Is the above 'duck-typing' idiom considered very useful to a
> Lisper? It seems logical to me that duck-typing works best in an
> environment where it is ubiquitous. If users have to implement
> accessors specifically to use your library, it is not as good as
> if they had already implemented one as a matter of routine.

It's a little more complicated than that, the classes involved have to
have special interfaces to tell setf/getf what to do, sort of a
compile time equivalent of __setattr__/__getattr__ if I remember right.