[Prev][Next][Index][Thread]
Re: performance for scientific computing
On Friday, August 3, 2001, at 10:45 am, Gabor Greif wrote:
> "Sébastien de Menten" wrote:
>> BTW, does anyone know why they did not write Gwydion Dylan in
>> Lisp/Scheme
>> instead of using a low-level language (C I think) ? These 3 languages
>> are
>> quite similar and the little differencies could have been soften with
>> macros. I probably miss some point.
>>
>> Sebastien
Apple Dylan was written in Macintosh Common Lisp, and a couple of early
(prefix) Dylan interpreters were written in Scheme (people who ask for
prefix Dylan are basically asking for Scheme).
The infix syntax, and particularly the dreaded infix macro system, blows
syntactic similarities out of the water. Also, d2c is a Dylan
*compiler*, so a Lisp/Scheme runtime isn't an issue.
What is an issue is portability. d2c and mindy compile using GCC on just
about any platform (Unices, CygWin, BeOS, MacOS X), and using
CodeWarrior and VC++ on their respective platforms. Whilst Lisp is a
brilliant language, it doesn't have one all-conquering compiler
available on almost every platform, and even with (ANSI-) Common Lisp
and the Scheme standard, any compiler in any language is slightly
different from every other compiler for the same language. With
widespread support for a single compiler (GCC), C makes more sense for
portability and future-proof maintainability.
This is *not* a criticism of Lisp/Scheme, it is a comment on the market
for Lisp/Scheme compilers vs. C compilers.
- Rob.
--
"The idea behind Dylan—to offer a range of dynamism appropriate to each
piece of an application—feels right, and after using Dylan you will
become frustrated with C++ and Java."
- Peter Norvig, Software Developer Magazine.
References: