Thus far, we have described the parts of AFL that deal directly with manipulating the speech state. Remember, however, that AFL is implemented on top of Common Lisp, so all Common Lisp statements may be used when writing AFL program segments. Common Lisp has conditional statements, loops, recursion, etc., so the full power of a conventional language is available. Naturally, were the audio-rendering system to be implemented on another programming platform, AFL would have to be fleshed out to include general programming-language statements.