Idiomatic scheme and generic programming, why only on numbers ?

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Published on 2010-04-22T14:32:05Z Indexed on 2010/04/22 14:33 UTC
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generic-programming

Hi,

In Scheme, procedures like +, -, *, / works on different types of numbers, but we don't much see any other generic procedures.

For example, length works only on list so that vector-length and string-length are needed.

I guess it comes from the fact that the language doesn't really offer any mechanism for defining generic procedure (except cond of course) like "type classes" in Haskell or a standardized object system.

Is there an idiomatic scheme way to handle generic procedures that I'm not aware of ?

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