Philip> Samantha, you need to provide me with references if you want Philip> me to believe this. No LISP compiler has ever been optimized Philip> to any serious degree AFAIK. The nature of the language makes Philip> it difficult to write efficient code in the first place. And Philip> I suspect that these "many problem domains" don't include any Philip> that involve numeric calculations.
Philip, I think your latter sentence is exactly wrong! Mathematical code is exactly what's MOST EASILY OPTIMIZABLE using techniques as exist in the Stalin Scheme compiler, or better yet in the Java supercompiler. Each numeric operation is of course no faster after optimized or super compilation; but these advanced compilation techniques can reorganize the math in the code so as to require fewer numeric operations. And these advanced compilation techniques are easier to apply to LISP or Refal or Haskell than to Java, and easier to apply to Java than to C++ So, mathematical code is exactly where one should expect the largest advantage of optimized LISP over Java or C++ ... -- Ben G ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?list_id=303
