begin quoting boblq as of Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 01:09:04AM -0800: > On Thursday 03 February 2005 12:54 am, Stewart Stremler wrote: > > begin quoting Andrew P. Lentvorski, Jr. as of Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at > > 10:36:05PM -0800: > > > On Feb 2, 2005, at 8:48 PM, Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > > Naturally. It's an obvious thing to optimize on. And if the optimization > > is relatively transparent and doesn't change the syntax of the language, > > it's conceptually irrelevent ... everything behaves /as if/ it were all > > cons-cells. > > Not really. The guys who knew what was going on were often using > that implementation detail to dig deeper into the underlying data > structure. This leads to (as you might expect) a huge number of > difficulties when the implementation is changed.
Indeed. Optimization makes code faster as the expense of making it brittle. > This problem was a killer for a lot of FORTH code that > was from a modern perspective too integrated, i.e. the > implementation was seamlessly optimized. It's good to have boundaries beyond which you pretend not to know what is going on. A few "shear planes"* in the code is a good thing... > But it made a lot of sense to those who understood it > at the time. Not really much different from the early > LISP code. Cleverness can sometimes be counter-productive. * I hope it's obvious what I mean by this. -Stewart "Cleverness is not always better than maintainability" Stremler -- KPLUG-List mailing list [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
