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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: <Pine.A32.3.91.941024091829.14402C-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> <CyAJyE.3pL@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <Pine.A32.3.91.941026134243.38686T-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org>
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 17:04:07 GMT
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In article <Pine.A32.3.91.941026134243.38686T-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> "William D. Gooch" <goochb@swim5.eng.sematech.org> writes:
>On Wed, 26 Oct 1994, Jeff Dalton wrote:
>>
>> Look, I don't *know* the answers.  I'm saying how it seemed to me.
>
>Fine.  So am I.  I worked for Symbolics during some of this, but I was 
>not a hardware designer.  
>
>I pretty much concur with the rest of the comments in this post.
>
>Going back to your earlier comments though, I disagree with the statement 
>that "The specialized / micorcoded machines should do worse than CISC 
>machines against RISC."  One reason this probably isn't true is word 
>length.  Some of the Lisp architectures incorporated a word length that 
>accomodates tag bits with enough left over for a virtual memory pointer 
>or 32-bit (or larger) numeric data to fit in a single word.  This, coupled 
>with parallel hardware for doing some important lispy things, will tend 
>to make them win, even when the raw clock rate is noticeably lower.  The 
>only time a conventional RISC machine is going to win is when its clock 
>rate has been cranked way up (which is what's happening nowadays).

Fair enough.  That sounds reasonable to me.

Thanks for taking the time to go through this.

-- jeff



