Author: Tord Romstad
Date: 11:25:10 02/16/04
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On February 16, 2004 at 14:03:11, Robert Hyatt wrote: >Please re-read my statement. Look at the date. Then re-read yours. > >My statement was written in 1997. In general Lisp _was_ interpreted. No, it wasn't. Lisp has been a compiled language for *decades*. If you look at the ANSI Common Lisp standard (from 1991, if I recall correctly), you will see that the standard even *requires* a compiler. There is one implementation (CLISP) which compiles only to bytecode, all other major Lisp implementations have compiled to machine code since a very long time. >Of >course, so was BASIC. Yet there were basic compilers as well. My primary point >was speed. Lisp is slow. It always was slow. It always will be slow. It *isn't* necessarily slow. I have even provided one data point (from 1999, just two years after your statement was written) to illustrate that Lisp in practice often enables you to write *faster* programs in *less* time compared to C/C++. For complicated programs, it sometimes requires somewhat more expertise to write fast code in Lisp compared to C. You will also need some familarity with the internals of your Lisp implementation. I know what I am talking about -- I am not making all of this up. I have been working as a full-time Lisp programmer for almost three years, and I have used Lisp extensively before and after that time as well (mostly for mathematical tasks). In most cases, I find it very hard to write a C program which performs as well as my Lisp solution to the same problem. To a certain extent, the explanation of this is of course that I am a much better Lisp programmer than C programmer. But I am not a complete idiot in C either. After all, my chess engine, written in C, is stronger than most amateur engines. >That is why there has been no successful chess engine based on LISP yet. There hasn't been any attempt to write a conventional chess engine in Lisp yet. But I know that my engine would have been no weaker if I had implemented it in CMUCL instead of using gcc. My reason to use C rather than Lisp is not efficiency, but portability. Tord
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