Date: Sun, 2 Apr 1995 13:38:04 -0400 From: "Paul F. Werkowski" <pw@snoopy.MV.COM> To: hackers@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: CLISP clarification, Was: New Snapshot...Good and Bad.... Message-ID: <199504021738.NAA04498@snoopy.mv.com> In-Reply-To: <199504021500.KAA03948@bonkers.taronga.com> (message from Peter da Silva on Sun, 2 Apr 1995 10:00:18 -0500 (CDT))
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>>>>> "Peter" == Peter da Silva <peter@bonkers.taronga.com> writes:
>> Hmm, that beats GCL which starts life at 2.4 MB. Seems like it
>> used to be smaller than that. Anyhow bear in mind that Lisp
>> grows like a wart once it has to actually do anything.
Peter> That's not inherent in Lisp. I was doing useful stuff in
Peter> Lisp 1.5 on a PDP-11.
Probably not recently, I'll bet :) I perhaps should have
said that the Lisp process grows quickly as code and
data are added.
Peter> I can't imagine what GCL could possibly have in it to
Peter> require that sort of resource utilization. I've seen some
Peter> of the syntactic sugar people have added to lisp, but
Peter> surely all that stuff can be considered optional?
Actually GCL (formerly KCL/AKCL) is a pretty sparse
implementation of CLtL1 with its kernel and many runtime
functions in C. A large part of the code is the compiler
which does the lisp to C conversion (with optimizations).
Common Lisp the Language 2nd Edition (CLtL2) documents
the additions (not really options) that are included in
the ANSI Common Lisp spec - or at least what the ANSI
committe was thinking in 1989/90. The first big chunk
is CLOS, the object system, which has features C++
can only dream about and is one of the main reasons I
prefer to work in Lisp. I can pretty quickly prototype
a class structure in CLOS and test out concepts before
(yuk) grinding the result into C++.
comp.lang.lisp frequently erupts into discussions of the
relative merits of C vs Lisp and there are folks who would
like to see CL broken into a core + optional subsets just
to get the memory use down - but then it wouldn't be CL.
It's probably all moot anyhow as former Lisp'ers seem to
be looking at Dylan for future work. But still, a language
that is now around 40 years old and still represents
state-of-the-art may just be around a lot longer.
But this all digresses from BSD kernel hacking.
Waiting for cheap gigabit RAMs and tera-ops CPUs..
Paul
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