Subject: Re: Learning programming languages From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1999/07/22 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3141673671216777@naggum.no> * "Kucera, Rich" <kucerar@hhmi.org> | Well, what did the primitives look like before CLOS? you speak as if "primitive" is an intrinsic quality of something. | There must have been something. where did you get that idea? once upon a time, both CAR and LDB were machine instructions. these days, CAR may be a single instruction on some machine and several or even a function call on others. LDB is usually a shift and a mask on RISC processors, and byte pointers are probably not first-class objects like they used to be, so it's fast and inlined only for constant byte specifiers on fixnums. for instance. Common Lisp has no concept of forcing an implementation to make certain decision about which is primitive and which is built from primitive. for all you know, all the functions and types in Common Lisp may be "primitives", or none, which may be the case in a hosted (interpreted) environment. | I know it's irrelevant and burdensome to ask questions from a Java point | of view, where it does make a difference on an application level whether | something is an "int" or an Integer. Perhaps my learning would go faster | if I were to dispense with irrelevant knowledge, forget what I know and | try not to ask any questions... you should update your knowledge and understanding of Java when you get answers to your questions about Common Lisp. the problem with most of the questions from another world is that the requestors tend to forget that their old world is more in need of an update than the new world. it is unfortunately true that it often makes better sense to suspend all that you know from one world when entering another, just to see that you arrive at some "universal truths" while the details are different and some ways of getting at them may be from radically different directions. #:Erik -- @1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century