Author: Anthony Cozzie
Date: 12:15:16 02/16/04
Go up one level in this thread
On February 16, 2004 at 15:08:42, Uri Blass wrote: >On February 16, 2004 at 14:38:44, Robert Hyatt wrote: > >>On February 16, 2004 at 14:25:10, Tord Romstad wrote: >> >>>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++. >> >>Personally, I would take _any_ challenge to compete with a lisp program, when >>the goal is performance. Granted, high-level languages may reduce the >>_development_ time. > >I know nothing about lisp but >remember that you have not unlimited developement time and it is possible that >in limited time lisp is better for speed because you can also write code for >solving the same problem in C with limited time but the code will be slower >because you have not enough time to write the algorithm that you can write in >lisp and you need to use inferior algorithm. > >It is only a possibility and I may be wrong because I know nothing about lisp. > >Uri What Bob is saying (and I agree with this 100%) is that what you can do with a low level language is by definition a superset of what you can do with a high level language (given sufficient time/money/motivation). Chess engines are usually small enough projects that it is possible to do everything in C. Assembly is getting harder nowadays because you must have so many different versions: good assembly for P4 is not good assembly for Athlon, and of course an x86-64 version is completely different. But I think that a lot of programs (web browsers, word processors, etc) simply don't need to be fast and _should_ be written in a high level language. Sadly it is looking like that language will be C#, rather than ML or Lisp. anthony
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