More Lisp crap from DDJ

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Nov. 7th, 2007 | 09:49 am

Here's another ancient article about Lisp, Implementing Bicubic Splines from Doctor Dobb's Journal. I got excited because I like splines. However, while the idea of republishing old Lisp articles online has merit, this one doesn't offer a lot of insight for the modern world. For example:

You could write a Lisp routine to calculate the points along the curve, but such a routine would be very slow. In any case, you would still need to access a physical line-drawing function in order to connect the points into a curve. The faster and better way to handle this calculation is to call the C routine, _Spline, which is found in Listing One.

Bah!

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Comments {3}

(no subject)

from: anonymous
date: Nov. 7th, 2007 04:03 pm (UTC)
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So write a routine in lisp then! Frankly, I'm curious.

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Zach Beane

(no subject)

from: [info]xach
date: Nov. 7th, 2007 04:05 pm (UTC)
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Frederic Jolliton wrote many routines in Lisp for the CL-VECTORS package.

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(no subject)

from: anonymous
date: Nov. 7th, 2007 08:10 pm (UTC)
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A direct port would look virtually the same but with different grouping characters, e.g., "t2 = 1.0 - t1; /* (1 - t) */" could be "(setq t2 (- 1.0 t1)) ;; 1 - t".

I can't tell how old the article is. (It has yesterday's date, but that can't be right.) The last reference is 1990, and it mentions System 6.0.2 (1988). As one data point: Apple was still writing the OS in assembler at this point.

Dick Gabriel's benchmarks were published in 1995, and they contributed massively to the great speed of CL compilers today. I'm not surprised they thought Lisp was slow. Take the worst Lisp compiler you've seen in the past 10 years, and run it on a top-of-the-line 16MHz 68030 with 2MB of RAM and tell me how it goes. :-)

Our real "problem" is that (Common) Lisp is so long-lived. CL is so useful we were using it for a decade before it really got up to speed. Now it's useful *and* fast, but people remember the language that was so slow you couldn't write _Spline() in it on System 6.

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