General Lisp Type Specifiers

Question

I recently started messing with type specifiers to improve code efficiency. This is a list of all type specifier characters in the Lisp standard.

I do not see a tree in the forest.

Can someone give (or indicate) a brief description of the different type specifiers and when can they be used?

Although I am interested in learning about all of them, my direct interest is related to the differences between numeric types (fixnum, bignum, float, single-float, short-float, etc.)

Answer 1

CLtl2 describes a version of Common Lisp before its standardization. Do not use it as a reference, there are various differences from the standard.

Lisp Hyperspec, ANSI Common Lisp.

Common Lisp HyperSpec : 4.2.3 . .

Answer 2

:

fixnum - , ;

bignum -

double-float - IEEE; , .

single-float - IEEE; , ,

short-float long-float , , CL