Path: utzoo!mnetor!uunet!mcvax!ukc!dcl-cs!simon
From: simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: Re: Strings
Message-ID: <488@dcl-csvax.comp.lancs.ac.uk>
Date: 24 Mar 88 15:29:47 GMT
References: <512@ecrcvax.UUCP> <768@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> <5348@utah-cs.UUCP> <776@cresswell.quintus.UUCP>
Reply-To: simon@comp.lancs.ac.uk (Simon Brooke)
Organization: Department of Computing at Lancaster University, UK.
Lines: 10
Keywords: bignums, vectors, lists
Summary: Just because someone else does it, doesn't make it wise.

In article <776@cresswell.quintus.UUCP> ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>Xerox Lisp uses lists for bignums to this very day.

Yes, true. But please don't assume this means it is efficient. For
example, I recently benchmarked a Xerox 1186 running Interlisp (Koto)
against the new Acorn Archimedes running Arthur Norman's Cambridge Lisp.
Generally the Arch was a bit faster, reflecting the simpler lisp and
faster processor. But running (fact 1000) it was 321 (three hundred and
twenty one) times faster - and this must reflect grotesque inefficiency in
Xerox' bignum code.