"Pascal J. Bourguignon" <p...@informatimago.com> wrote in message
news:87sk0qkzhz....@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com...
Nothing extraordinary here. Common Lisp is more efficient than C.
http://www.lrde.epita.fr/~didier/research/verna.06.ecoop.pdf
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1144168
Actually, it's hard to find a language that has no compiler generating
faster code than C...
I had a quick look at Lisp to see if your claims had any basis. I tried this
program:
(defun fib (n)
(if (< n 2)
n
(+ n (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)) )
))
But it gave the wrong results and it took ages to figure out why. Even after
downloading a working version for comparison, it's was difficult to spot the
extraneous 'n' (I think I was concentrating on getting the round brackets
all in the right places).
I thought you were saying that Lisp (and dynamic typing in general) was
better for pointing out errors? The above error in C would have been picked
up more easily I think (due to less parentheses clutter, and more obvious
separators between terms).
As for speed, executing fib(38) took about 60 seconds on my machine (gnu
clisp with no switches set). (Compared with 3.5 seconds, for my own
interpreted, dynamic language, and 0.6 seconds for C.)
--
bartc
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