Early Programming Books

Van Snyder van.snyder at sbcglobal.net
Mon Jun 21 18:02:38 CDT 2021


On Mon, 2021-06-21 at 17:47 -0400, Rich Alderson via cctalk wrote:
> > Date: Sun, 20 Jun 2021 22:19:02 -0600From: ben via cctalk <
> > cctalk at classiccmp.org>
> > LISP still can't be compiled.
> 
> May I respectfully suggest that you don't know WTF you're talking
> about?
> LISP compilers have existed for decades.  One of the *early* MIT AI
> Lab papersby Guy Steele is a comparison of the compiler for MACLISP
> (the Project MACdialect of Lisp, nothing to do with Apple computers)
> with the then currentFORTRAN compiler for the PDP-10 (called "F40"),
> in which the LISP compilergenerated better code than the FORTRAN
> compiler.
> Things have not degenerated since then.

Dave Card took Cray's eight favorite Fortran benchmarks and re-wrote
them in SISAL. They all ran faster.
>                                                                 Rich


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