Subject: Lisp (was: Programming Languages for Lojban)

From: John Cowan <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Mar 2002 05:51:23 -0500 (EST)

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 <[email-masked]> 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_