Newsgroups: comp.ai
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From: hall@aplcenmp.apl.jhu.edu (Marty Hall)
Subject: Re: lisp
Message-ID: <DpLnJC.694@aplcenmp.apl.jhu.edu>
Organization: JHU/APL Research Center, Hopkins P/T CS Faculty
References: <45355.jalars@maroon.tc.umn.edu>
Date: Tue, 9 Apr 1996 14:42:48 GMT
Lines: 23

In article <45355.jalars@maroon.tc.umn.edu> "James A. Larson"
<jalars@maroon.tc.umn.edu> writes: 

>I'd say Lisp is more powerful than C or Fortran in almost every way.  It 
>never came into widespread favor because it used to run many many times 
>slower (now it just runs many times slower).  Just another case of where 
>the power of the language comes at the price of execution speed.

In my experience, Common Lisp code compiled at high optimization
settings tends to be up to 25% slower than similar C or C++ that is
not very heavily numeric-calculation intensive. It may be as much as
50% slower for very intense number crunching.

The Lisp aficionados on comp.lang.lisp will say that this large of a
slowdown need not be the case. But it takes a relatively seasoned Lisp
developer to make the appropriate optimizations to narrow that gap.

But the real story, IMHO, is that people tend to do things very
differently in Lisp than in lower level languages like C or C++, so
comparisons for "identical code" are not all that meaningful.

						- Marty
(proclaim '(inline skates))
