SBCL was for years a compilation only Lisp implementation. A few years ago an interpreter for Lisp was added, but is not used by default. SBCL has two compilat

SBCL was for years a compilation only Lisp implementation. A few years ago an interpreter for Lisp was added, but is not used by default. SBCL has two compilation modes: a) compilation of source code files to machine code files and b) compilation of Lisp expressions in memory. a) can be used via the function COMPILE-FILE and b) typically via COMPILE (and thus also via EVAL) Generally compilation of Lisp is nothing new (the first compiler was written in the early 60s) and the Common Lisp language definition (first in 1984) has many features to support Lisp compilation: compiler interface, code inlining, similar semantics for interpreted and compiled code, type annotations, ...