Re: Very poor Lisp performance

Jamie Border wrote:
> "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.

Both. As you say, it is so inherently flawed that there is little point
wasting time thinking about it. For the time being, I don't believe LOC can
be significantly improved upon.

>> 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).

Cool. :-)

>> 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...

Is Lisp code not made less maintainable because of all those brackets?

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy
http://www.ffconsultancy.com
.

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