john@mingus.mitre.org (John D. Burger) (03/21/91)
brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes: ... even if compile times were instant I'd spend forever just waiting for most programs to run. Based on my experience, this is nonsense. I develop AI applications in Common Lisp that do complex things like understand natural language utterances and reason about how best to design graphical representations of information, and these programs run fairly quickly, i.e. fast enough to act as an interface to another program. This is on a middle-of-the-road Sun workstation, using Allegro Common Lisp, which isn't very fast, and doesn't perform as much optimizations as does Lucid or CMU Common Lisp. To top it off, the code was written with NO type declarations and very little attention paid to efficiency in general, this being research. It could almost certainly run ten times faster, with a month or two of effort. Dan also writes: A machine is much more than its ``primitive datatypes.'' But Lisp doesn't even provide full access to pointers. What does this mean? "Pointers" are an artifact of languages like C, as are "type errors", whatever those are. I'd much rather use a language that hid pointers and the size of integers from me, than a language which lets you write into arbitrary memory locations. Dan continues: In fact, I've been focusing on the prototyping and development stage of a program, because that's when it's most important to get good compile times *and* run times. As someone who has worked in a C shop in another life, building business applications, I can say that there's no comparison between the two with respect to development time or maintainability of code. Some of my coworkers are tearing their hair out trying to implement AI applications in C++. John Burger john@mitre.org -- John Burger john@mitre.org "You ever think about .signature files? I mean, do we really need them?" - alt.andy.rooney