>Do Common Lisp implementations have a "core" that multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch can be desugared to? Yes, that's the Meta Object Protocol. It isn

>Do Common Lisp implementations have a "core" that multiple inheritance and multiple dispatch can be desugared to? Yes, that's the Meta Object Protocol. It isn't on the standard, yet most Lisp implementation have it, and now you can use it in a portable way as well. >If it's the former, I would say that optimizing a small core is easier than optimizing a big language. Python's core is 200-400K lines of C Common Lisp's "core" (that means, not including "batteries") is considerably more involved and complex than Python's. Creating a new CL implementation is a big deal.