Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta,comp.lang.lisp
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!uknet!festival!edcogsci!jeff
From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Comparison: Beta - Lisp
Message-ID: <CwFn5G.G7C@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Sender: usenet@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (C News Software)
Nntp-Posting-Host: bute.aiai.ed.ac.uk
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
References: <354q47$60i@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> <MAFM.94Sep16133030@wambenger.cs.uwa.edu.au> <35bttv$3mu@belfort.daimi.aau.dk>
Date: Tue, 20 Sep 1994 14:34:28 GMT
Lines: 41
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.beta:84 comp.lang.lisp:14741

In article <35bttv$3mu@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> jacobse@daimi.aau.dk (Jacob Seligmann) writes:
>Matthew McDonald (mafm@cs.uwa.edu.au) wrote:
>
>> What Jacob's saying is 
>>   (a) Typical code written in c performs more than 5 times
>>       better than code in his favourite language using available
>>       implementations, and
>>   (b) there's no reason why his favourite language couldn't be
>>       implemented so it was competive.
>
>Again, I was merely answering to an earlier post which was 
>misinterpreted as saying that BETA was *inherently* 25 times or more 
>slower than C. I did so by using the original C program containing 
>tight loops with lots of pointer arithmetic to write an equivalent BETA 
>program which was "only" 5 times slower (thereby trying to show that 
>the factor or 25 was much too pessimistic), and finally explained the 
>difference in the code produced (thereby trying to show that the 
>slowdown was not a product of the language design, only its current 
>implementation).

Which is exactly right.  It's necessary to know why the code is
slower and whether it can be fixed (and how hard it would be to
fix it) before you can reach conclusions about the _language_.

>> What lisp (and beta) advocates seem to often ignore is that quality of
>> code generation really matters to most people.

Who's done that?  I haven't noticed it.  But then I'm not on the
lookout for such things.

>> Telling people that a factor of 5 difference in run-time doesn't
>> really matter doesn't encourage them to use your language.  Neither
>> does telling them that *in principle* or *some day in the future*,
>> your language could be competitive.

So?  Let's settle first what's true.  What people decide to do with
that information is then up to them.

[More reasonable stuff from Jacob Seligmann omitted.]

-- jeff
