Re: Differences between Elisp and Lisp

[Oliver Scholz <alkibiades@gmx.de>]

Phillip Lord <p.lord@russet.org.uk> writes:
[...]
> Optimisation might be an issue as well of course, but processors are
> fast these days! Its nice, but not essential. 
[...]

I disagree strongly. Emacs/W3 for example is sloooow, even on my 1,5
GHtz machine. I think there are a lot of possible applications for
Emacs, that would be too slow in Elisp and which—this is just a guess,
of course—nobody implements for this very reason. How about an SVG or
Postscript interpreter written in Elisp, for example? Or other fancy
stuff, that we don't even imagine right now? (I would have thought
that images are “nice, but not essential”, until D. Kastrup wrote
preview-latex. So who could guess what possible could come out, if
Elisp would be by a magnitude more efficient?)

BTW, I always wondered whether Elisp is partly to blame for the fact
that the myth of Lisp being a “slow interpreted language” continues
to live. Most of my friends which are interested into computers have
never heard about CL (until I told them, that is), but they have
heard that Emacs is partly written in Lisp.

    Oliver
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