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From: papresco@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Paul Prescod)
Subject: Re: Why lisp failed in the marketplace
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Thanks for an interesting article. I don't understand one thing, though:

In article <hbaker-0603971513420001@10.0.2.1>,
Henry Baker <hbaker@netcom.com> wrote:
>I no longer trust what manuals and customer service people tell me.  When
>approaching a new language/compiler, I spend a day (or much more) looking at the
>actual code generated.  It's amazing how good and how bad it can be.
>Unfortunately, you have to go through the same exercise _each time a new
>release comes out_, so it's pretty exhausting.  But if you're building
>something where performance and/or correctness is really important, you have
>little choice.  

...

>It is dangerous to trust what even the compiler writers themselves think, since
>the interactions of the various types of optimizations tax their own
>intuitions.

I don't understand how a day (or much more) of reverse engineering can give
you a better understanding of the compiler than the compiler writer. 
Proving a compiler "correct" does not seem to be a tractable problem
(theoretically or practically), so the best you can get is a warm fuzzy
that the compiler writer knows what he or she is doing.

 Paul Prescod

