Re: DEFUN list argument

In comp.lang.lisp Axel Reichert <mail@axel-reichert.de> wrote:

Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com> writes:
 

The battle you are trying to pick here is outdated.

 
I have read so a couple of times. Interesting. But what is a Lisper to
do in the source code? Convert it all to vectors/arrays? Use more
imperative idioms than recursion? Do not care, because it is all handled
by the implementation?

It depends.  Arrays type declarations and optimize settings will get you
to about 2-6 times slower than C on general style code working within CPU
cache, that is good enough for some purposes.  Many programs have
poor cache behaviour, if behaviour is inherently bad, than cache
misses may hide effects of poorer code generator in available Lisp
implementations.

ROW-MAJOR-AREF may help for multidimensional arrays.  But if you
want to do better, than you probably need external code.  C may
be good enough, but "fast" libraries freqently use specialized
assembler.  Frequently, small number of fast external routines can
give you needed speed.

Note that many programmer do not care much about program speed.
Certainly it makes no sense to spend lot of effort to speed up
non-critial parts.

--
                              Waldek Hebisch