Re: why are there [v e c t o r s] in Lisp?

["Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>]

Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:

> "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com>
> writes:
>
>> As I said, you could write a compiler performing
>> global analysis to determine how you use a given
>> object in the data flow, and therefore store the
>> literal as a list or as a vector.
>>
>> One complication would be I/O. The data flow
>> analysis could let the compiler determine that some
>> object read shall be stored as a vector or as list,
>> but the reading function wouldn't know that from the
>> external syntax, and it would need an additionnal
>> type parameter.
>>
>> Notice that this introduces some kind of static
>> typing which is rather contrary to the lisp spirit
>> and makes thing so bad in serializing non-lisp
>> like languages.
>>
>> At this point, the best you could do is to start
>> writing your own compiler to implement this idea,
>> and see whether it's a good idea or not.
>
> I'm not suggesting anyone do this. 

I'm definitely suggesting  you do that!  You definitely need to learn
something, and writing your own compiler, and implementing that idea
would be the best way for you to learn it.

-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk