Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.dylan
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From: cracauer@cons.org (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Inner Classes in Java
Message-ID: <1996Nov19.123629.16124@cons.org>
Reply-To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Organization: '(a (cons)tructive site))
References: <vrotneyE0wBzz.D5A@netcom.com> <AEB1790A-ACB8A@205.149.164.180>
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 96 12:36:29 GMT
Lines: 34
Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.lang.lisp:23802 comp.lang.dylan:7581

"Chris Page" <page@best.com> writes:

>William Paul Vrotney <vrotney@netcom.com> wrote:

>> What makes you think that a Lisp interpreter machine has to be a special
>> purpose machine?  Why is an Intel 486 interpreter any more general than a
>> Lisp interpreter?  You can say that the Lisp interpreter machine is
>> "higher level", but that should make the hardware faster.
>[...]
>> In some sense a Lisp interpreter machine is *more* general than a 486
>> interpreter machine.

>I can see your point, and it reminds me of a comment a friend made about
>how these architectures are, in a sense, C-machines. But I'm only familiar
>with 680x0, PowerPC, and 80x86 hardware. I'd like to see an example or two
>of the higher-level features of your proposed Lisp-machine that could be
>executed more efficiently than, say, an equivalent series of PowerPC
>instructions. In addition, I'd like to see how these might enhance
>execution of languages other than Lisp, or at least not slow them down or
>waste valuable logic gates.

The Self group at Sun published various papers about how the output of
their Self compiler looks like. According to them, there's very little
difference between C code and highly optimized code for 'dynamic'
languages. And that is not because the target machine is a "C"
machine, they claim the requirement to run other languages fast is to
be like C output anyway, so the optimal machine is the same for both.

Martin
-- 
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <cracauer@cons.org> http://cracauer.cons.org Fax +49405228536
"As far as I'm concerned,  if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
 plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
