Subject: Re: Can I use Lisp? From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: 2000/10/25 Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3181477127456574@naggum.net> * Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> | I agree with your second statement, but don't see any justification | for the first, unless you implicitly assume that every programmer is | interested in performance on each problem. If I am not particularly | concerned about performance, I will not notice the slowdown from | user-defined functions, so I will not be discouraged from using | abstraction. This is a good point. I tend to stress that CLISP is not suitable if your goal is performance, anyhow, so I should also argue that it's good enough as long as you don't prioritize performance. _However_, my experience is that even though you ignore performance (as long as you get your answers within a reasonable amount of time), a large number of programmers will want to know the "expensiveness" of what they do and then soon discover that builtins in CLISP are very fast (especially bignums) while their own code runs much, much slower. Even if you ignore performance consciously, I don't think you can completely ignore the effect of _observing_ that some things are much faster than others even if you did not set out to find out about this to begin with. Hence my cautions. If you know about them and are aware of the conditions under which CLISP is and is not good enough, I don't think CLISP is a bad choice (as long as you use the ANSI mode with the -a option, but that that's not the default is another gripe). #:Erik -- I agree with everything you say, but I would attack to death your right to say it. -- Tom Stoppard