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From: smcl@sytex.com (Scott McLoughlin)
Subject: Re: Why do people like C? (Was: Comparison: Beta - Lisp)
Message-ID: <5LHTuc1w165w@sytex.com>
Sender: bbs@sytex.com
Organization: Sytex Access Ltd.
References: <CyAJyE.3pL@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, 26 Oct 1994 19:06:51 GMT
Lines: 52

jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:

> In article <Pine.A32.3.91.941024091829.14402C-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> 
> >On Fri, 21 Oct 1994, Jeff Dalton wrote:
> >
> >> In article <Pine.A32.3.91.941018090811.17296C-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.or
> >> >On Mon, 17 Oct 1994, Jeff Dalton wrote:
> >> >
> >> >> ...
> >> >> But for how long could specialized/specially-microcoded machines
> >> >> continue to be faster than the alternatives?
> >> >
> >> >For as long as someone is willing to put a small fraction of the effort 
> >> >into making the chips go faster as they do for stock chips.  Lisp 
> >> >hardware has not been pushed anywhere near as far up the performance 
> >> >curve as it can be.  
> 
> Part of the problem is that the smaller market tends to mean they
> won't be pushed as far.
> 

Howdy,
        While agree with the general intuition regarding Lisp
chips, it's interesting to look at what's going on in the
Forth community.  Chuck Moore is apprently designing little
Forth chips like crazy, muP21 or something.  Various versions
and new chips seem to be forthcoming (no pun intended).
        I don't remember the exact figures, but the prices
seemed to be _very_ _very_ low and the performance figures
_very_ _very_ high.  I remember a Dr. Dobb's Journal 
interview with CM where he claimed a whole new low cost
micro-foundry industry made this possible. This is vague
memory but I think we had costs in the dollars range and
performance in the >100 megahertz range - WOW! Check out
comp.lang.forth for more authoritative info, which is
posted fairly regularly.
        Ok. So why not Lisp chips?  One reason might be
size. I could imagine a simple $5 Scheme chip that 
had to be put on a board with $500 worth of fast DRAM
(what are RAM prices these days?).  Or maybe it's
simple "the market". Forth seems to be popular for
embedded control apps, so there's a market "ready" to
buy the things to run Forth. I'd think that the software
overhead for a likely Scheme/Lisp market would be much
greater than for a Forth market (ain't no "print-pretty"
expected by Forther's writing embedded control apps ;-).
Ideas?

=============================================
Scott McLoughlin
Conscious Computing
=============================================
