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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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References: <36ui4a$3k2@relay.tor.hookup.net> <CxBJ7o.9Kv@festival.ed.ac.uk> <Pine.A32.3.90.941007154447.16592P-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org>
Date: Tue, 11 Oct 1994 17:18:56 GMT
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In article <Pine.A32.3.90.941007154447.16592P-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> "William D. Gooch" <goochb@swim5.eng.sematech.org> writes:
>On Fri, 7 Oct 1994, J W Dalton wrote:
>
>> ....  Many people went wrong
>> thinking that hardware should be oriented towards particular languages
>> -- consider Lisp machines; the idea that we should microcode instruction
>> sets for Prolog, Lisp, etc; object-oriented machines like the Rekursiv;
>> and so on.
>
>This may be a different thread, but: it isn't clear to me that "thinking 
>that hardware should be oriented towards particular languages" was where 
>the Lisp machine makers "went wrong."

If you mean "why did they fail in the market", or something along
those lines, I don't know.  But I didn't say language-oriented
hardware was where LM makers went wrong.  "Where they went wrong"
sounds like a claim about *the* cause of failure.

But specialized hardware was *a* mistake because ordinary hardware
often worked just as well or better.  Consider Lingo, the language
for the Rekursiv.  An implementation on a not very fast Sun was
faster than the one on the specialized machine.  Or consider what
happened to the early-80s trend towards microcoding once RISC came
along.  Specialized machines are CISC++, so to speak.

Non-specialized machines were cheaper and faster as well as supporting
a wider range of software.  The idea that they're really specialized
for C does not hold up, in my view.  

-- jd
