Path: utzoo!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!think.com!barmar From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin) Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Subject: Re: Memory Management in Lisp? Message-ID: <1991Mar5.040348.25396@Think.COM> Date: 5 Mar 91 04:03:48 GMT References: Sender: news@Think.COM Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA Lines: 19 In article pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Antonio Grandi) writes: >I have this idea that a very large, very large part of Computer Science >is simply the consequence of dealing with this gap. Certainly most of OS >and DBMS design is centered around it. Minimizing IO operations and >memory usage is a large and important worry of any programmer's work. And if we didn't have OSes hiding these details then a large part of Computer Science would be programming I/O and memory management routines. And we'd still have to worry about minimizing I/O operations, because they are still orders of magnitude slower than in-memory operations. If the programs don't get written, it doesn't matter how little memory they run in. -- Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp. barmar@think.com {uunet,harvard}!think!barmar