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From: fjh@munta.cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson)
Subject: Re: Comparing productivity: LisP against C++ (was Re: Reference Counting)
Message-ID: <9500119.17619@mulga.cs.mu.OZ.AU>
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Organization: Computer Science, University of Melbourne, Australia
References: <19941203T221402Z.enag@naggum.no> <3danhm$fqi@xmission.xmission.com> <3dc3ur$fsc@wariat.wariat.org> <3dd145$gnl@xmission <19941231.033741.284927.NETNEWS@UICVM.UIC.EDU>
Date: Sun, 1 Jan 1995 08:12:55 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.c++:105452 comp.lang.lisp:16222

dhanley@matisse.eecs.uic.edu (David Hanley) writes:

[Someone writes:]
>: Ohhh... at this point us poor lispers listening in don't know whether
>: to laugh, cry, or call in the men with the plain white ambulance. 'You
>: can do arithmetic on unsigned chars'. Someone tell me, what is
>: 'A' + 'A'? Is it 'A'? Is it 'B'? Guys, they program in this.
>
>        Unless you attempt to deal with issues like this, you will not
>be able to get run-times like some of the C runtimes posted here.

C's lack of type-checking in this regard - the failure to distinguish
a character type from a small integer - does NOT make it any more efficient.
Languages such as Pascal and Ada which do distinguish them are just as
efficient for those sort of operations.

-- 
Fergus Henderson - fjh@munta.cs.mu.oz.au
