Thank you for taking the time to explain. I now get it. SBCL includes the compiler in each binary and this is called incremental compiling. That explains the ex

Thank you for taking the time to explain. I now get it. SBCL includes the compiler in each binary and this is called incremental compiling. That explains the expressiveness. It is kind of like a JIT when needed. Compile everything you can AoT, leave dynamic parts to runtime compilation. It makes perfect sense. Thanks . I guess the difference is that in an interpreter you don't go down to assembly, you parse and run stuff. The moment you cross the line to generate bytecode/machine code or transpile into a different language you get a compiler.