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Date: Sun, 19 Jul 2009 21:51:10 +0200
From: Georg Bauhaus <see.reply.to@maps.futureapps.de>
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Subject: Re: Alternatives to C: ObjectPascal, Eiffel, Ada or Modula-3?
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Date: 2009-07-19T21:51:11+02:00
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Pascal J. Bourguignon wrote:

> Moreover, notice how Pr. Knuth use a rather low level language to
> describe his algorithms (a virtual machine language actually).  He
> doesn't expect anything fancy  semantically from his algorithmic
> language. http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

Actually, a paradigmatic counter-example of Knuths' is, I think,
Algorithm T (Topological sort in �2.2.3), which is I guess not
targeted at number crunching, but serves as an example of
ingenious use of hardware properties.  While the description,
"taking away nodes from a graph", is in a sense high level,
the data structures used, and the runnable program are just
about as far away from high level Lisp as can be, I'd think ;-)
So how could this be achieved in a general fashion, using
syntax transformation?
So a translation that yields this proven un-functional
data layout doesn't look so trivial to me; wouldn't
you end up writing algorithm-specific optimizer macros
or some such if you wanted the same efficiency to be gained
from a Lisp DSL?