29 Feb
2000
29 Feb
'00
8:16 a.m.
On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 02:12:02AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
On February 28, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:
'Twas a joke, man...
Well I knew you were being facetious, I just took the opportunity to try to
bait whoever has an opinion or actual knowledge of how LISP gets interpreted.
Any takers? :-)
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Hmm...what processor instructions might one create to deal with a
language with more parens than actual code? ;)
I doubt that is an issue... I've never written a lisp interpreter (wish
I'd had one of those CS classes where they do that) but I'd guess the
ASCII source code gets tokenized into some kind of tree structure which
is probably interpreted by doing a tree traversal, so the parens are all
gone by that point (they just tell it how to build the tree). But I can't
think of any hardware optimizations that help with trees, other than the
concept of a "stack", which is hardly a new one. Evidently there are some
though.