Re: Where comes the myth that Lisp is interpreted?!

Markus Grueneis wrote:
Duane Rettig schrieb:
JShrager@xxxxxxxxx writes:

where the hell comes the myth that Lisp is
slow because it is interpreted?!
This has been bugging me since it was first posted, and I don't think
that it ever got a good answer. These are part of the story:

I think it's simpler than that, and more fundamental. Ask yourself
why new students (who don't have the history under their belts) make
the same old mistake; they accept so easily that Lisp is of course
interpreted and slow - there is something much deeper (and simpler)
than history going on here:


Well, about this "why new students...". Take a real-life example. I'm
sitting in a lecture, badly translated as computer mathematics, which is
an introduction to to the 3Ms (Mathematica, Maple, Matlab), and more or
less the first time my collegues encounter FP (through Mathematica).

After pointing out during a lecture that Mathematica was very much like
Lisp, I asked if it may be programmed in any Lisp dialect.

Short answer: "Oh, I don't know, but for sure it's not Lisp, for
performance reasons that would not be possible."

I do not know about the performance of Mathematica, but since it does
not run in a (debug 0) (optimize 3) like way, I hardly believe it.

But of course you can now ask 50 new students about the performance of
Lisp. Argument through authority.

Good story. Here's another ...

Mathematica is written in C, the program is huge complex and allegdely
difficult to maintain.

Once Jon Harrop wrote an interpreter that performed the important core
operations of Mathematica in OCaml. His version was much, much simpler
than the C version and still quite fast. He showed this to Wolfram
software but they weren't interested in changing their program.

.

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