On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Ralph Johnson wrote:

> On 2/17/02 9:26 PM, "Scott A Crosby" <crosby at qwes.math.cmu.edu> wrote:
> 
> > Yep.. Most of this isn't more than an implementation problem.. Why were
> > there no really good and fast LISP (~comparable to C) compilers for
> > numerics and bit/byte manipulations before CMUCL? Because nobody had
> > thought to write one. :)

(It's not just "thought to", but "figured out how to" :))

> I recall that MacLisp on the PDP10 was faster at numeric computing than
> FORTRAN back in the early 70s.  They took it as a challenge and kept working
> on their compiler until they beat FORTRAN.

One pointer on Common Lisp and fast numerics:

http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/1044/http:zSzzSzhttp.cs.berkeley.eduzSz~fatemanzSzpaperszSzlispfloat.pdf/fateman95fast.pdf


I seem to recall stuff on using Lisp for celstial mechanics? that beat out
Fortran...but I can't find a link.

Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.