Earlier quoted context omitted.
Interestingly, heterogenous lists are the only example I ever hear cited for how ML-family type systems can cramp your style. It leads me to wonder if the situation is not unlike Fibbonacci sequences and naive recursion. Anyway, I find that usually when I want a heterogenous list in Lisp, all I really need is a tuple. I want an ad-hoc way to group some values together (i.e., I don't want to bother creating a named st…
I rarely need to calculate Fibonacci numbers, but I use lists of varied types of objects constantly.
To be clear, this is what ML's variant types are all about. You can easily create a list that contains e.g. both ints and chars:
let mylist = [`Int 5; `Char '5']