iteration - don't optimize it

O'NEEL Bruce beoneel at bluewin.ch
Fri Feb 1 14:54:08 UTC 2002


Scott A Crosby writes:
<snip>

 > 
 > Smalltalk is not necessarily inherently slow. How many millions of man
 > hours have been spent on C compilers? Many of the smartest people in the
 > world have been working for decades on C and static-language compilation.
 > Contrast this to Smalltalk.
 > 
 > I'll bet you that if you got together a couple of profs here and about a
 > half-dozen grad students on the project, you'd have a dynamic
 > compiler/interpreter combo that'd be fully dynamic, yet come very close to
 > C++, *perhaps* even exceed it. (Dynamic recompilation is very very cool.)
 > 
 > Smart people can do amazing things; the trick is attracting them to
 > squeak/smalltalk.
 > 

People are amazed when they watch me use my old PPC macos box or even
order 68k macos box with Macintosh Common Lisp.  

Oh, they say, it's interpreted.  
Um, no, I respond, compiled.  
When do you compile it?
When I type, there is no choice.
No, that can't be true.

one defun and disassemble later and their view of the world changes
:-) 


-- 
Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "Any sufficiently complicated C
or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified bug-ridden
slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."  

Bruce O'Neel                       phone:  +41 22 950 91 46 (fow now)
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