Out of curiosity, I tried factorial(1000) in Franz
Allegro CL/PC 1.0[1] on the Pentium 90 machine I am
using at the moment. Computing it 3 times takes 0.22
secs plus 0.17 secs garbage collection time (= 0.39
secs) although if I run the loop 30 times it takes
1.92 plus 1.54 = 3.46, averaging a bit faster than the
Sparc running at 66MHz (I assume Prof. Sloman's times
included GC).
I don't think the compiler technology is dramatically
better, so these figures reflect processor speed. It
really is a pity that, as recent postings reveal, there
is no pop11 available at the moment for Window's users.
For both Windows or Mac programming, there *are* good
commercial Common Lisp implementations (and some shareware
ones I know less about). It would make a lot of sense for
the pop11 (as distinct from the poplog community) to write
a pop11 to lisp compiler front-end which generated lisp[2] as
output. I don't mean a toy demonstration, but a real
implementation that treated Lisp as the target machine.
I reckon something a bit bigger than Alphapop (measured by
features/built in functions) could be done for about 1/3 the
effort it would take compiling to machine code: it wouldn't
be necessary to write the garbage collector, editor etc, and
CLOS would also provide OOP mechanisms that could be directly
used. Also, lisp would be simpler to generate and debug
than machine code. I would expect the speed of the compiled
pop11 to be comparable to the lisp, but a bit slower.
(There are precedents for this. The language REDUCE, used to
implement a large symbolic algebra/maths system, was implemented
as a front-end which translated to Lisp, but looked much more
like Algol, Pascal etc.)
If any pro pop people (PPP) are interested in collaborating
by e-mail on the design and implementation of such a pop
system (with common lisp/CLOS as the target), for eventual
release as shareware, then please e-mail me. I don't have
the time to do the whole thing, but would be interested in
contributing to it. If enough people are interested (three
or four) then October 95 is the target release date!
Regards,
Jonathan Cunningham
Work: jlc@bmtech.demon.co.uk Home: jlc@sofluc.demon.co.uk
[1]Strangely, version 2 runs about 40% slower than version 1.
[2]Scheme might be a better target lisp dialect, but I don't
know enough about it, and don't have a Scheme compiler.
|