Lisp and supercompters

[ferrante@world.std.com (Richard D Ferrante)]

A somewhat different take on this issue is given in
"A Practical Functional Program for the CRAY X-MP" by Boyle and Harmer
Argonne National Lab Preprint #MCS-P159-0690

In which they get a lisp program to run faster than a fortran program
on the Cray. The secret is that the lisp program generates Fortran
code -- but the code is better than hand written fortran. 

You of course lose all of the run time checking that Lisp does -- but
Fortran isn't all that bad when it comes to numbers.

It is feasable to add some special constructs to the compiler such as
fixed datatype and fixed size arrays to allow it to generate fast code
for special purpose machine architectures, e.g. supercomputers.
Without throwing away all of the advantages of a lisp environment.

--- 

Richard Ferrante
(617)-739-7055
ferrante@world.std.com