Symbolics

From: Dave McGuire <mcguire_at_neurotica.com>
Date: Tue Feb 29 01:12:02 2000

On February 28, Shawn T. Rutledge wrote:
> > Hmm...what processor instructions might one create to deal with a
> > language with more parens than actual code? ;)
>
> I doubt that is an issue... I've never written a lisp interpreter (wish
> I'd had one of those CS classes where they do that) but I'd guess the
> ASCII source code gets tokenized into some kind of tree structure which
> is probably interpreted by doing a tree traversal, so the parens are all
> gone by that point (they just tell it how to build the tree). But I can't
> think of any hardware optimizations that help with trees, other than the
> concept of a "stack", which is hardly a new one. Evidently there are some
> though.

  'Twas a joke, man...

       -Dave McGuire
Received on Tue Feb 29 2000 - 01:12:02 GMT