Re: Does ANSI Common Lisp have pattern matching?

Jon Harrop <jon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

Pascal Costanza wrote:
Jon Harrop wrote:

I have no experience from CLOS but, from what I have heard, it is
extremely slow.

Maybe you should check your hearing, then.

This article:

http://www.franz.com/about/press_room/clos.article.pdf

states that saying CLOS is not slow because computers are now faster than
they were. Well, if only I'd known that before...

Perhaps not only your hearing, but your English reading skills as well
:-)

The portion of the article in question says (in a section that is
responding to common myths, speicifically: "CL/CLOS is slow"):

"Since 1985, PC have become 100 times faster. Much slower languages,
such as Java and Visual Basic, have become popular. Today, CL/CLOS can
run effectively on any standard PC and its implementations are faster."

1. This is not just about CLOS alone. It is true that the article is
about CLOS, but CLOS did not exist in 1985, and the myth about CLOS
being slow is the same as the myth about CL being slow. This is why
the author consistently wrote about CL/CLOS, rather than CLOS alone.

2. There is no "because" (or "therefore") stated or implied in this
statement. The conjunction is "and", directly attributing CL/CLOS's
speedups to both machine speedups (which have benefitted all
languages, of course), as well as inherently faster implementations,
both of CL and of CLOS.

--
Duane Rettig duane@xxxxxxxxx Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/
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