Page, Bill writes: > On Wednesday, October 19, 2005 4:40 AM Martin Rubey wrote:
> > > > It is notable I think, that the original Axiom developers chose to > > > > re-implement SPAD as Aldor (written in C) rather than continue to make > > > > improvements to SPAD. > > I'm absolutely certain that the reason for this was rather a political > > than a technical one. > > Could you explain what makes you absolutely certain of this? Can you cite > any references to Axiom or Aldor literature? Well, disclaimer: *I* am absolutely certain. This does still not mean that it's true. I don't have any references. > In what sense was it "political"? Who stood to gain by such a decision? At that time, Axiom and Aldor were commercial products, and Lisp was said to be slow and Axiom had a reputation of being so slow, close to being unusable. > To me the technical reasons seem rather obvious. So please forgive me if I > seem rather skeptical. Citing Renaud: > I was quite disappointed with Aldor, the main interest was the ability to > produce fast code by compiling to C and using the latest bignum libraries, > when I went at NAG to port the real closure in Aldor the efficiency gain was > quite low just a factor of 1.5 to 2.5 ... I think that will be much reduced > for current versions of axioms since gcl is able to produce efficient code > and it also uses recent versions of gmp. Martin _______________________________________________ Axiom-developer mailing list [email protected] http://lists.nongnu.org/mailman/listinfo/axiom-developer
