Path: utzoo!utgpu!watserv1!watmath!att!ucbvax!bloom-beacon!aiai.edinburgh.ac.UK!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.edinburgh.ac.UK (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme
Subject: Re: how to optimize a program.
Message-ID: <8995.9008231639@subnode.aiai.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 23 Aug 90 16:39:02 GMT
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 18

> The old MIT-CADR lispmachine environment had similar tools, but
> unfortunately:
> (1) the coorespondence back to "line of code
> " or even S-expression/subexpression was lost during the compilation
> process. (The VMS compilers and PCA keep good track of this info
> anyway, and so do the various Unix tools)

> (3) as far as commercial lisp implementations on conventional machines,
> you can forget about even trying to DEBUG compiled code, much less
> profiling it at the level of detail that C/FORTRAN/PASCAL implementations
> allow.

Indeed, I find it somewhat ironic that Lisp, a language famous for its
associtaion with powerful programming environments, should almost always
come with tools that are much worse than those available for C.  I'd
pick dbxtool over most of the Lisp debuggers any day.  

-- Jeff