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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
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Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 17:07:00 GMT
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In article <781539380snz@wildcard.demon.co.uk> cyber_surfer@wildcard.demon.co.uk writes:
>             I'm often tempted to write a Lisp
>compiler (perhaps for a subset of Scheme) that generates an asm
>file as its output. The point would simply be to demonstrate that
>it can be done, and done as well as for Small C, and to show the
>programmer what the code does at the machine level.

That is can be done has alreay been shown: e.g Franz Lisp's compiler
produced a assembly file and then ran the standard assembler.  I
can't say whether it was done as well as for Small C.

>It could be better than telling them, which might just give them
>a reason to say, "Well, of course it's slow, it's written in Lisp",
>which would be ignoring all the apps written in C++ that are big
>and slow. 

As well as ignoring lots of other evidence that slow is often
acceptable.  Windows is pretty slow.  People run Macs w/ the
cache off.  They use shells and other interpreters.

-- jeff
