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From: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: <20650@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Date: 18 Jan 91 02:45:08 GMT
References: <127724@linus.mitre.org> <5569@turquoise.UUCP> <3954@skye.ed.ac.uk> <20544@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <3965@skye.ed.ac.uk>
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In article <3965@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton) writes:
> ...  The things I was thinking of were more like:
>
>  *  Fixnum arithmetic.
>  *  Dynamic extent declarations.

Yes, I realized that later. The first would be very useful, the second,
for the purposes of (fluid-let ...) can possibly be implemented with
minimum cost *and* without interfering with the correct optimization of
tail recursion, as in [1].

>By efficient, I mean something like: as fast as C.

Ah, I thought you probably meant only as fast as an average CommonLipth
with all tricks turned on. ;-)

>... An efficient Scheme
>requires a lot of attention to garbage collection ...

No more or no less than anything else that has a need for GC ...

>... and compiler technology, 

Aw, come on. You well know that there is a lot of mileage on this one.
Writing an average compiler for R3.99RS/IEEE scheme is essentially
trivial. [in comparison to something like C for example]. Further, it is
my experience that some low-cost common-sense optimizations (that don't
require a detailed side-effect analysis as in Rabbit and others) still pay
off handsomely. It just depends how far you want to go. (!!)

>and this tends to make the small size of the language less significant.

See (!!). The ever-growing number of scheme implementations seem to suggest
that the small size and reduced complexity of the language *is*
significant. It *is* possible to have a small, std-compliant, useful and
fast scheme.

oz
---
[1] B.F. Duba, M. Felleisen, D. P. Friedman, Dynamic Identifiers can
    be Neat, Computer Science Technical Report 220, Indiana University,
    Bloomington, Indiana, April 1987.

---
We only know ... what we know, and    | Internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca 
that is very little. -- Dan Rather    | UUCP: utzoo/utai!yunexus!oz