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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: <3965@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 17 Jan 91 20:00:08 GMT
References: <127724@linus.mitre.org> <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> <20544@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 45

In article <20544@yunexus.YorkU.CA> oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
>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.

Suppose I use T.  Would that count?  (I am willing to try your test
some time, if I can do it for free.  There is no money for Lisp here
these days.)

>>	...  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]

I have no problem with the idea that Scheme's control structures,
including call/cc, can be implemented efficiently.  Ditto lists,
function calls, ...  The things I was thinking of were more like:

  *  Fixnum arithmetic.

  *  Dynamic extent declarations.

>>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.

By efficient, I mean something like: as fast as C.

But I think the "difficult" is more important.  An efficient Scheme
requires a lot of attention to garbage collection and compiler
technology, and this tends to make the small size of the language
less significant.