dove@mit-bug.UUCP (Web Dove) (02/07/86)
Is the lisp overhead of generating and manipulating single or double
flonums on the sun-3 large?
The Symbolics 3600 is attractive because it allows typed data with 32
bit flonums in the pointer field, so array inner products can be done
without generating garbage, however double performance is the pits.
Since the 68000 has no tag bits, I assume LUCID either uses pointers
to flonums and collects garbage. Perhaps with the proper declarations
in the lisp code it avoids the need for tags. However, that could be
a problem if you make a programming error since there would be
no type checking.
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