Re: functional style compared to procedural style and comments on a Mathematica function I saw.

Richard J. Fateman wrote:
> > The shootout already did. Lisp does very poorly in terms of performance.
> 1. (Liar^2 pants on fire).

The fastest Lisp implementation on the shootout is SBCL. On the intersection
of the sets of implemented tests, SBCL is 4.2x slower than GCC-compiled
C++. Lisp also requires 1.45x as many lines of code as C++.

> > The use of "'", "`", ",", "#" and "@" is reasonable in Lisp but
> > unreasonable in other languages? For example, what does the ``,', do in
> > that code?
>
> Are we running an obscure program contest? Even the program you
> display above, which is very non-lispish because of the use of "loop"
> can be read mostly by noticing that function calls look like
> (function_name arg1 arg2 ...)

That code was from the most efficient Lisp implementation of my ray tracer.
So if you want to Lisp to be almost as fast as other languages (that
require far less code) then you'll be needing Lisp code like "``,',".

> > Mathematica was only $50 last I looked. Or you could write your own...
> > ;-)
>
> Our student store charges $134. I wrote my own and Wolfram threatened
> to sue.

Yes, it is now illegal to code in Lisp in many countries.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com
.

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