Another item worth fixing in the staging faq would be this answer to the slowness question
A: Lisp is interactive, which a lot of people take to mean that Lisp is (always) interpreted. Early lisps (and others, like CLisp) are interpreted, although most modern lisps are compiled. Early Lisps were compiled, and by the late 1960s there were Lisps that were compiled all the time, even expressions evaluated at the top-level were compiled before execution. (The first compiler to compile itself was written in Lisp, a fact not overlooked by better programming language textbooks such as Michael Scott's "Programming Language Pragmatics".) I think the prevalence of the free interpreter xlisp two decades ago is largely responsible for the interpreter misconception, especially among the members of the UNIX/UUCP/Usenet community. I don't think there was such a popular, compiler-less Lisp before then. _______________________________________________ Gardeners mailing list [email protected] http://www.lispniks.com/mailman/listinfo/gardeners
