On Tue, Feb 29, 2000 at 02:12:02AM -0500, Dave McGuire wrote:
> 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...
Well I knew you were being facetious, I just took the opportunity to try to
bait whoever has an opinion or actual knowledge of how LISP gets interpreted.
Any takers? :-)
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Received on Tue Feb 29 2000 - 16:16:31 GMT