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From: David Betz <dbetz@xlisper.mv.com>
Subject: Re: Which one, Lisp or Scheme?
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Martin Cracauer wrote:
> In fact, I already had an argument with the author of
> Xlisp about it after some magazine compared Lisp and perl (that is
> Xlisp and perl) and headlined that Lisp is slow.

XLISP, especially the earlier versions before 3.0 is slow.  I readily
admit that.  I wrote it to experiment with language implementation and I
released it when people asked for a version of Lisp that ran on small
machines like the Z80 under CP/M when there were no other alternatives.
It has lived on because its easy to port and very small.  I still use it
myself because it is fairly easy (for me at least) to embed in
applications.  (I'm working to improve that now.)  However, it will
never compete with commercial implementations of Lisp.  I used Macintosh
Common Lisp while I was at Apple and Lotus and enjoyed it very much.  If
I was going to do any serious Lisp development, I would definitely go
back to a supported commercial implementation or to a high quality free
implementation like MIT CScheme.  If Lisp is going to be compared with
other languages for speed, it should be the commercial implementations
that are used in the comparison.  (Although perl isn't commercial as far
as I know.)

-- 
David Betz
DavidBetz@aol.com
dbetz@xlisper.mv.com
(603) 472-2389
