[rescue] San Antonio, TX area rescue

[Joshua D Boyd]

On Fri, Dec 06, 2002 at 03:25:17AM -0500, dave at cca.org wrote:
 
> One weird thing about the Connections Machines is that lisp was
> highly optimized for them - it was supposedly the best language
> to program the beast in. Arguably, the CMs were "lisp supercomputers"
> (a slight exageration, but not by much).

It's not that strange if you take into account that the original purpose
was to be an AI machine, and this was the heydey of lisp for AI.

Lisp can be extremely fast, with some work.  In fact, most of the
current lisps (ACL and CMUCL in particular) easily rival other languages
for speed.  Garbage collection can interupt the speed, but that can be
reconfigured to only run at specific times.  

JPL used to use lisp extensively for embeded applications, and Naughty
Dog (maker of Jax and Dexter, and Crash Bandicoot) still uses lisp
extensively in performance intensive programs.

Still, it would be interesting to know more about *lisp, especially how
it went about spreading the load around to so many CPUs.

-- 
Joshua D. Boyd