Re:Three unique features of Lisp in 2010
by ScottBurson on Saturday January 29, 2011 @06:47PM
(#2156817)
> To the extent this makes sense, it's equally true of Common Lisp.
I'm afraid not. Christophe Rhodes has a proposal for an extensible sequence protocol, but AFAIK it is implemented only in SBCL. There's no portable way in CL to extend the built-in hash tables. And you certainly can't have your own cons class that responds to the built-in CAR and CDR.
Of course you can always shadow the builtin names and redefine them in your package as generic functions; this is what I did in my FSet functional collections library. But that's not quite the same thing as having extensibility designed in.
To the extent this makes sense, it's equally true of Common Lisp.