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

[Barry Margolin <barmar@alum.mit.edu>]

In article <87pp0eckss.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com>,
 "Pascal J. Bourguignon" <pjb@informatimago.com> wrote:

> Emanuel Berg <embe8573@student.uu.se> writes:
> > Why the syntax is there at all is to provide fast
> > (faster) access to the vector data type which has
> > other time and space properties than do lists.
> 
> ABSOLUTELY NOT.
> 
> For example, in C++ you have vectors and lists, 
> but you don't have any literal syntax for them.
> 
> You can have fast and slow data structures without having any literal
> syntax for it.
> 
> 
> Why do you keep confusing the two concepts?

When he said "faster access", I think he just meant that the syntax 
makes it more convenient to use them, not that the code runs faster.

Like the way Javascript's object literals make it very easy to use them 
to implement named options to functions, rather than putting this into 
the basic argument processing syntax like Lisp and Python do.

-- 
Barry Margolin, barmar@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
*** PLEASE post questions in newsgroups, not directly to me ***