On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 02:05:09PM -0800, Bakul Shah wrote: Nope. It's my challenge and it stands as I stated it. People said I was wrong when I said Lisp was perceived as slow. I picked a perfectly reasonable example of a common problem (text processing), gave a benchmark, gave a pointer to how the C program was made fast, and asked for a lisp program that even comes close. If that can't be done, then the claim that lisp is slow still stands. When people said I was "putting inaccuracies into the archives" or "perpetuating a myth" I wondered if I was wrong. Nobody said "well, yes, C is faster for systems stuff or this or that, but lisp is faster in this domain". They said that the claim that lisp is slow is not true. Just saying that lisp is not slow is not the same as demonstrating it. I'm more than willing to be wrong, that's how I learn. But the proof here is to show up with a pure lisp grep that is fast as the C version. I'm no lisp expert, not by any stretch, but I've never seen a lisp program that out performed a well written C program. The point was that lisp was/is perceived as a slow language. Several people said that's false, I'm just asking for them to demonstrate that it is false by writing grep in lisp. Who knows? Maybe it can be done.

On 2/16/2018 5:53 PM, Donald ODona wrote: I know of a first-person shooter game that has embedded scripts in the maps. The scripting language in the maps is ... LISP. ;) - Not sure if it's JIT, but it's definitely interpreted and not compiled. It's been around since the early 2000's, has versions on XBOX and PC and newer versions are being released to this day. Knowing the company creating these new versions and maps, I doubt they moved away from LISP. Good ole Halo.

I suspect that back in the day Fortran may have beat C for scientific computations (vector stuff would be my guess). But x86 extensions do vectors as do the GPUs so I don't know of anything that beats C in a big way. On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 05:56:59PM -0500, Arthur Krewat wrote: -- --- Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com http://www.mcvoy.com/lm

On Fri, Feb 16, 2018 at 06:18:28PM -0500, Toby Thain wrote: Nobody claimed that. I claimed, based on what I've been told by people who programmed in lisp and some small personal experience, that lisp was and is perceived as a slow language, certainly slower than C. Lisp fans hate that claim because they want everyone to program in Lisp, or at least let them program in lisp. I tipped my hat to the belief, I've never experience it myself but I've heard it claimed, that a skilled lisp coder solves problems, especially compiler like problems, in lisp faster than a skilled C programmer would. I think that reality is that lispers like lisp because they can claim they are "done" faster than they would if they had to do the same thing in C (or other procedural) languages. That is a HORRIBLE reason to like a language. In my not at all humble opinion. If lisp were a language that was easy to read, for all programmers not just people who love lisp, OK, maybe. But it is not, it's a miserable language to scan and understand. Contrast it with C or go or any of other procedural languages. Any programmer can read C and quickly understand what it is doing. The same is not true of lisp. I strongly suspect that lisp people optimize for speed of writing whereas most experienced people optimize for the speed of reading. It's write one, read many. But not lisp. Or at least, nobody wants to take up my grep challenge. --lm P.S. For the record, I tried to like lisp. I wrote lisp programs, I tried. Just like I tried to like emacs. I'm apparently not smart enough to join the hallowed grounds where the lispers live. C/vi for stupid me.