Andrew LM Shalit

One of the design goals of Dylan was to allow early error detection. I've been saying this in public talks for years, and the language was designed accordingly. Much more early error detection can be done in Dylan than can be done in Lisp and Smalltalk.

On the other hand, the language does not mandate that certain errors be detected at compile-time rather than run-time. This would have amounted to prescribing a certain level of type inference in all conforming Dylan implementations. We chose not to take that course, to allow more modest interpreted versions to use the name.