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. :)
> 

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.

-Ralph