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From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc,comp.object
Subject: Re: blip [Re: Dynamic typing -- To Have and Have Not ...]
Message-ID: <18112:Mar2013:06:0391@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 20 Mar 91 13:06:03 GMT
References: <22032@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <11820:Mar1923:59:3591@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1991Mar20.041716.4486@cs.cmu.edu>
Organization: IR
Lines: 32

In article <1991Mar20.041716.4486@cs.cmu.edu> ram+@cs.cmu.edu (Rob MacLachlan) writes:
> I think that you overstate the case.  Common Lisp is at least as portable as
> C,

What world do you live in? About two-thirds of the UNIX systems I use
can't even compile any of the available Lisps. In any case, portability
is defined by what's out there, not what could be out there; and about
95% of the machines I use do *not* support Lisp even if they *could*.

> and Lisp systems offer unsurpassed compile-debug turnaround times (through
> incremental compilation.)

``Unsurpassed'' is exaggeration, and even if compile times were instant
I'd spend forever just waiting for most programs to run.

> But if you just mean that you want to use all the machine's
> primitive datatypes with reasonable efficiency,

No. A machine is much more than its ``primitive datatypes.'' But Lisp
doesn't even provide full access to pointers.

> >[...] if you want to buck the establishment, it's your problem to prove that
> >dynamically typed languages aren't as inefficient as most experiments have
> >found them to be.
>  -- For some uses, efficiency isn't everything (research, prototyping,
>     development.) 

In fact, I've been focusing on the prototyping and development stage of
a program, because that's when it's most important to get good compile
times *and* run times.

---Dan