Subject: Re: MD5 in LISP and abstraction inversions From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 22:57:20 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3214249058771407@naggum.net> * Juliusz Chroboczek | The difference, however, is that most modern implementations of, say, C, | are pretty much identical from the programmer's point of view. In most | cases, C code that is efficient under both gcc/x86 and SunPro/Sparc will | be efficient on all (modern) platforms. But it is fairly unlikely that C code compiled for both IA32 and SPARC will be "efficient" in the same way. If you optimize too much for one of them, it is no longer "efficient" in the other. I also wonder what "efficient" means to you, and how you determine when you have achieved it. It is not an absolute term. As for the use of byte-compiled implementations or code, I completely fail to see what their impact on this discussion is. If you want your code to be "efficient", whatever it means, you choose a natively-compiled implementation, not a byte-code interpreter, so whatever efficiency issues may be perturbed by the existence of a such an implementation appear to me completely irrelevant to those who actually seek efficiency. /// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- Carrying a Swiss Army pocket knife in Oslo, Norway, is a criminal offense.