If this is a "troll" the please go bother another newsgroup.
If not read on.
In article <·······················@ts1-134.advancenet.net>,
James Hague <······@dadgum.com> wrote:
>I keep hearing mention of supposedly high performance Lisp
>implementations; systems that give C a run for its money in the
>performance department.
Well, for some computations each side can probably pick out
benchmarks to claim victory.
You will pay a modest premium for the dynamic features of lisp.
So "run for its money" likely means that it is the same ballpark.
If speed is the ultimate premium then C, if you manage to get it
to work, will likely be the winner.
The skill of the programmers is certainly a nontrival factor.
> But I haven't been able to find anything
>available for the all-pervasive Windows PC in a less than $5000 price
>range. So my questions:
Unless you need SQL/ODBC and/or CORBA, the Harlequin's Lispworks for
Windows is about an order of magnitutde lower than that price.
>* Are there _really_ some hot Lisp systems out there that can stack up
>against popular non-lisp PC programming environments?
Depends how wedded you are to your present tool's approach.
>* If they'd be fantastic for general application development, why are they
>such a well-kept secret?
A few reasons off the top if my head....
i. Unnatural fear of parentheses.
ii. Urban legend "Lisp is slow". "Lisp is interpreted".
iii. Mismatch impedance between the "libraries" commonly provided
by most OS'es and Lisp. [ Blame on both sides for this.]
iv. Willful ingnorance .... why use a screwdriver when my trusty
hammer can pound that screw in efficiently.
v. Tools haven't been aimed at this market. [ I don't think
many of the Comerical Lisp vendors have considered
Visual Basic a competitor. Perhaps they should have.]
Tranditionally, Lisp has be used to tackle non-general
applications. Programs for which a well understood approach isn't
quite known.
--
Lyman S. Taylor "emacs - ... Do NOT use vi to edit your programs.
(·····@cc.gatech.edu) Watching you stuggle through the
edit/compile/debug cycle [with ] vi
will make me despair of your sanity..."
P. N. Hilfinger CS 164 Fall '92 Syllabus