Subject: Re: Theory #51 (superior(?) programming languages) From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.no> Date: 1997/01/26 Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.scheme Message-ID: <3063274536533203@naggum.no> * Scott Schwartz | My point is valid: you want to treat lisp like a shell, but then ignore | the cost of doing so when the overhead is in question. In contrast, the | time you gave for the a.out version includes the cost of dynamically | loading all the shared libraries. your "point" is not only invalid, it is completely ridiculous. I measured 1 million calls to these functions, and got the timings I did, and don't even try to believe I fork'ed and exec'ed a million times. I wanted to measure the time of the function itself, not the time of running a program. by running the same function a million times inside a given process, the time information I get for Lisp can be expressed as 1000000(binomial+looper) and for the C as 1000000(binomial+looper)+startup to find the time of the looper and the startup costs, I ran both with (binomial 35 35) to find the cost of the function call. those timings were subtracted from the times I listed. considering the amount of idiocy I get from C users when timing stuff and C loses or proves to be less than the super-efficient hands-down winner of all contests, my belief that C damages people's brains in irreparable ways is indeed solidifying. #\Erik -- 1,3,7-trimethylxanthine -- a basic ingredient in quality software.