Re: Very poor Lisp performance

Jon Harrop wrote:



I'm trying to decide if it is worth learning Lisp so I am more interested in
learning why Lisp programmers chose Lisp and seeing how a seasoned Lisp
programmer can translate my ray tracer, for example. Why do you use Lisp?

Obviously I cannot do a good enough job of the conversion myself to make for
a fair comparison with the other languages (that I am much more familiar
with). It is also interesting to study the differences between the 8 Lisp
and 13 Scheme translations that have been done.

So now I'd like to know how Lisp is more expressive than the alternatives.
What practical problems are easier to write in Lisp than in other
languages? Macros seem to be a strong point here. Lisp's macros are more
powerful than OCaml's and Lisp programs are likely to be faster than
Mathematica programs. So there is one niche. Are there others?



Well, real world programming can me quite ugly.  Here is an example
of a program in Lisp which is non-trivial (no macros, well not
quite true... capi:define-interface is one such builtin LispWorks
macro, oh ... and defclass and capi:with-geometry, etc etc.).

http://www3.telus.net/public/whumeniu/concentration.lisp

A Windows exe of the program is downloadable from

http://www3.telus.net/public/whumeniu/concentration.zip

If you would write a program with the same functionality in
Ocaml (for comparison) it would be interesting.  This program was written in
response to a c.l.l discussion were someone was making similar
queries about CL (but from a C++ shareware prespective).

Wade
.

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