Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!oz
From: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: <20544@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 16 Jan 91 23:22:17 GMT
References: <127724@linus.mitre.org> <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: news@yunexus.YorkU.CA
Organization: York U. Communications Research & Development
Lines: 47

In article <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
> ...... Nor am I
>convinced that Scheme will be faster.

I know life is too short to even attempt to convince you, :-) so let me
just say that if you ever want to find out for sure, at least try out an 
industrial-strength implementation (such as Chez etc.) for your tests.
Who knows, you may be surprized.

>	...  Standard Scheme, at least,
>lacks many of the efficiency tricks (e.g., declarations) available
>in CL.

Scheme literature thus far available (Steele [1], Dybvig [2], Kranz et al.
[3] just to mention a few) seem to suggest that scheme may not need much in
the way of efficiency tricks (except perhaps to indicate to the compiler
that built-in functions will not be re-defined) to be compiled and
optimized properly.  [On the other hand, arguably a case may be made for
additional constructs for even *better* results]

>It is still difficult to implement an efficient Scheme, despite
>its size ...

Give me a unit of measure for your understanding of *efficient*, so that
we'll know what this new claim is all about.

oz
---
[1]  Guy Lewis Steele Jr., Rabbit: a Compiler for Scheme, MIT AI Memo
     474,  Massachusetts  Institute  of Technology, Cambridge, Mass.,
     May 1978.

[2]  R.  Kent  Dybvig,  Three  Implementation  Models   for   Scheme,
     Department  of  Computer Science Technical Report #87-011 (Ph.D.
     Dissertation), University of  North  Carolina  at  Chapel  Hill,
     Chapel Hill, North Carolina, April 1987.

[3]  David Kranz, Richard Kelsey, Jonathan A. Rees, Paul Hudak, James
     Philbin  and  Norman I. Adams, Orbit: An Optimizing Compiler for
     Scheme, Proceedings of the  SIGPLAN  Notices  '86  Symposium  on
     Compiler Construction, June 1986, 219-233.

---
Where the stream runneth smoothest,   | Internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca 
the water is deepest.  - John Lyly    | UUCP: utzoo/utai!yunexus!oz