Re: Overloading of primitive operators

[kanderso@DINO.BBN.COM]

  Redistributed: CommonLoops.pa
  Date: Tue, 13 Mar 90 14:15 CST
  From: Nat Ballou <ballou@ernest.aca.mcc.com>
  Subject: Overloading of primitive operators
  To: CommonLoops.pa@xerox.com
  Postal-Address: 3500 West Balcones Ctr. Dr., Austin, TX 78759
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  One (of the few?) advantage(s) that C++ holds over CLOS is the
  ability to overload the primitive operators in C.  For example, C++
  allows one to overload the equivalent Common Lisp operators eq,
  aref, not, +, -, *, /, mod, >, <, etc.  I am under the impression
  that ANSI Common Lisp (with CLOS) will not allow such operators to
  be overloaded.  Is this correct?  If so, why?

I believe this is correct.  I presume one reason why is to allow
current implementations of LISP to remain relatively efficient,
without a lot of work.  For example, functions like EQ, NOT, and CAR,
are inline coded for speed.  If everything became generic overnight,
LISP would be a lot slower until we added a lot of type information,
and got better at type deduction.  

I believe C++'s overloading is more like pattern matching on types of
operands at compile time, rather than generic function dispatch.  This
lets C++ do a lot of inlining.

I hope that over time, LISP will become more completely object
oriented, since this would allow efficiencies that currently aren't
possible (inline method dispatch for example).  This plus good
compiler optimizations could make a very high performance LISP.
  
k