Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!think.com!mintaka!ai-lab!life!tmb
From: tmb@ai.mit.edu (Thomas M. Breuel)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.clos
Subject: Re: CLOS' popularity (really Lisp vs C, again)
Message-ID: <TMB.91May29144641@volterra.ai.mit.edu>
Date: 29 May 91 18:46:41 GMT
References: <9105131105.AA13630@hcsrnd> <9105181833.AA05092@rice-chex>
	<1991May28.033548.26907@cs.cmu.edu> <13715@goofy.Apple.COM>
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In-reply-to: shebs@Apple.COM's message of 29 May 91 17:59:43 GMT

In article <13715@goofy.Apple.COM> shebs@Apple.COM (Stan Shebs) writes:
   An observation: it's easier to push *up* from a base language than *down*.
   [...]
   Experienced Lisp programmers, however, start out high-level, and build
   even higher-level functionality, but have a terrible time trying to
   optimize the lower-level machinery that limits performance.

That's not entirely true. Sure, the most commonly used Lisp dialects,
CommonLisp and Scheme, were poorly designed from the point of view of
being able to specify low-level optimizations. However, this is not
an inherent problem with Lisp. Individual implementations of Lisp dialects,
like T and AKCL, let you hand-optimize down to the machine level. The
only problem is that the necessary language constructs are not part
of any standard.

					Thomas.