Re: Very poor Lisp performance


"Hartmann Schaffer" <hs@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:WqfMe.1588$Dd.6727@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Jon Harrop wrote:
>> ...
JH>> However, LOC overly penalises Lisp and Scheme, IMHO. Specifically, Lisp
and
JH>> Scheme programs are virtually unreadable unless the parentheses are
JH>> staggered by spreading expressions over several lines and using an
JH>> automatic indenter. So if I were to put a Lisp implementation of the
ray
JH>> tracer on my site then I'd either state that, or I'd give results using
JH>> some other measure of verbosity, like characters.

Hmm. What would you (JH) be measuring here?

a) Keystrokes required to produce the code (see below, though)
b) Some kind of 'intrinsic verbosity', which would require some *serious*
thinking about idiomaticity, relevance of formatting and massive, massive
sampling to make it statistically relevant.


> i doubt lisp or scheme will gain anything there: the language defined
> words tend to be quite lengthy, and afaict that seems to encourage
> programmers to use pretty length identifiers for their own identifiers,

Yes

> so character count might penalize lisp even worse. otoh, the lengthy
> identifiers make lisp code quite easy to read and understand.

Yes, and using a decent editor with auto-completion (Emacs) means that I hit
less keys to produce the token 'DESTRUCTURING-BIND' ( DE-B <META-TAB> ) than
you might think.

Oh, and all the ')))))' you see probably didn't get typed by hand (
<META-RET> closes all open parens).

>
> token count probably would be better

Yep, although (because I am biased) I would like to see
'keystroke/mouse-click' count instead. I think that with the requirement
for idiomatic variable naming, CL might not come out as 'verbose' as you
think...

>
>> ...
>
> hs


.

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