Subject: Re: Lisp is *SLOW* From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1997/07/22 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.programming,comp.lang.c++ Message-ID: <3078520173470566@naggum.no> * Marco Antoniotti | If we want, we could discuss at length why some of the design choices | of "destructive" operations in Common Lisp sometime have a | non-intuitive behavior. do they? the question is one of which value one looks at, I think. `sort' on a list returns a sorted list, but the cons cells that used to be that list have been reused. if we look at the return value of `sort', we get the sorted list. if we look at a random cons cell that has been reused in some unspecified way, who's to tell? like `nreverse' in one implementation swaps the `car' of cons cells, and in another the `cdr', we cannot know what a cons cell that has been destructively modified would contain, unless the operation is specified by the specification of the language, and it isn't for `sort' or `nreverse'. or, another way: after (sort <list> <predicate>), <list> is _history_. #\Erik -- there was some junk mail in my mailbox. somebody wanted to sell me some useless gizmo, and kindly supplied an ASCII drawing of it. "actual size", the caption read. I selected smaller and smaller fonts until it vanished.