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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: <CyAJyE.3pL@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <Pine.A32.3.91.941026134243.38686T-100000@swim5.eng.sematech.org> <38mv58$gs2@peaches.cs.utexas.edu>
Date: Thu, 27 Oct 1994 18:43:41 GMT
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In article <38mv58$gs2@peaches.cs.utexas.edu> gadbois@cs.utexas.edu (David Gadbois) writes:
>William D. Gooch <goochb@swim5.eng.sematech.org> wrote:
>>[...] I disagree with the statement that "The specialized /
>>micorcoded machines should do worse than CISC machines against RISC."
>
>I would hate to see the Lisp machines being misremembered as being
>just about performance.  Sure, they were better or at least
>competitive with "stock" hardware in terms of price/performance up
>until the mid to late 80's.  But, IMHO, the main advantage was the
>safety of the hardware/software environement -- you had to work really
>hard to write code that would randomly corrupt and crash things.

I wonder about this.  I didn't use our Symbolics machine very
much, but it did seem moderately easy to get it into an odd state.
(Not nearly so easy as with D-machines.)  Moreover, your Lisp code
could do something that required a reboot.  With an ordinary OS
(Unix), your Lisp process might get messed up but everything else
sailed on regardless.

-- jeff
