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From: gudeman@cs.arizona.edu (David Gudeman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The powerlessness of Lisp
Message-ID: <1149@optima.cs.arizona.edu>
Date: 26 Mar 91 19:01:37 GMT
Sender: news@cs.arizona.edu
Lines: 17

In article  <1991Mar26.165516.13035@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> Douglas E. Quale writes:
]...Byte copying is trivial in Common Lisp...

Still, Dan's point is valid.  There _are_ machine-level things you can
do in low-level languages that you can't do in Common Lisp, if for no
other reason than because Common Lisp has to protect its tags for
storage management.

It is also the case that pointer-like operations in Common Lisp are
less efficient than pointer operations in C.  For example array
indexing usually involves a type check, a range check, and an extra
offset or two.  This can be a problem since a lot of the time
efficiency is the main reason for using pointers.
--
					David Gudeman
gudeman@cs.arizona.edu
noao!arizona!gudeman