From jcowan@reutershealth.com Wed Mar 13 02:52:24 2002 Return-Path: X-Sender: jcowan@reutershealth.com X-Apparently-To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Received: (EGP: unknown); 13 Mar 2002 10:52:24 -0000 Received: (qmail 5456 invoked from network); 13 Mar 2002 10:52:23 -0000 Received: from unknown (216.115.97.172) by m3.grp.snv.yahoo.com with QMQP; 13 Mar 2002 10:52:23 -0000 Received: from unknown (HELO mail.reutershealth.com) (204.243.9.36) by mta2.grp.snv.yahoo.com with SMTP; 13 Mar 2002 10:52:23 -0000 Received: from skunk.reutershealth.com (IDENT:cowan@[10.65.117.21]) by mail.reutershealth.com (Pro-8.9.3/Pro-8.9.3) with SMTP id FAA19140 for ; Wed, 13 Mar 2002 05:52:28 -0500 (EST) Message-Id: <200203131052.FAA19140@mail.reutershealth.com> Received: by skunk.reutershealth.com (sSMTP sendmail emulation); Wed, 13 Mar 2002 05:51:23 -0500 Subject: Lisp (was: Programming Languages for Lojban) To: lojban@yahoogroups.com Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 05:51:23 -0500 (EST) In-Reply-To: from "Jim Carter" at Mar 12, 2002 09:10:30 PM X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.5 PL3] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit From: John Cowan X-Yahoo-Group-Post: member; u=8122456 X-Yahoo-Profile: john_w_cowan Jim Carter scripsit: > I don't know all that much about Lisp, but my impression is that it is much > more a procedural language. And if its pattern recognition code were > written in a highly procedural fashion, the result would be achingly slow. Lisp need not be slow; that's a mental hangover from the days when all Lisp systems were interpreters. Already back in the 70s Lisp numerical code ran as fast as Fortran. Lisp (especially its Scheme dialect) is fundamentally an Algol-style language, but with cheap object creation, garbage collection, local variables and function pointers (the two together are much sweeter than just local variables as in Pascal or just function pointers as in C), and first-class continuations (which provides for easy non-local control flow). It is greatly superior, as was said of Algol 60, to almost all of its successors. And there is a well-known Scheme-to-C translator which leverages gcc's rich supply of back ends. -- John Cowan http://www.reutershealth.com I amar prestar aen, han mathon ne nen, http://www.ccil.org/~cowan han mathon ne chae, a han noston ne 'wilith. --Galadriel, _LOTR:FOTR_