Re: Very poor Lisp performance

Jon Harrop wrote:
Joe Marshall wrote: 
Infix parsers are rarely used for several reasons.  The increase in
incompatibility is one reason, but there are others:

Infix macros are *hard*.

Do you mean it is difficult to implement infix in Lisp?

No, others mentioned that *there are* infix parsers (reader macros) for Lisp. Most people don't use them I guess :D

     You need to learn the prefix notation *anyway* (because code that
     operates on code needs to operate at the abstract syntax level,
     which in lisp is naturally prefix-notated lists).

So Lisp is rather tied to the built-in prefix notation.

Not at all. Implement whatever syntax you want. If you don't like Lisp syntax at all use a complete, different syntax (and language) like Dylan.

(consider the popularity of ternary ? : operator).

I used to use that a fair bit. Are you saying it is popular or unpopular?

It's not exactly elegant IMHO. I MUCH prefer Lisp's style of everything being an expression, so I can simply say (if (test bla) foo bar) *everywhere* I want, unlike C, which makes that stupid if-else/?: distinction (and both look ugly, and if-else requires ();{}s all over the place).

Languages drift.  And as I mentioned before, bandwidth and error
correction are importand factors.


Do you think that syntax is a significant source of errors when programming?
I believe that my errors tend to be at higher levels, e.g. algorithms.

True, an experienced C coder probably doesn't make syntax mistakes, or just ()s the code to be sure. But I feel like in a straight-jacket when coding C. Not because of memory management, but because of syntax (like the inability to use if and switch as an expression, the need to create a named function in order to pass it as a parameter, the awkward syntax for creating structures that I want to pass as arguments...).

--
I believe in Karma.  That means I can do bad things to people
all day long and I assume they deserve it.
	Dogbert
.

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