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Re: Selling Lisp



At 2:35 PM 2/2/95, paul hasse wrote:
 >I am looking for ideas on how to present a case for developing applications 
 >originally in lisp and when necessary, using a translator to take it to C.  

One question with translating to C - you should really ask yourself 
why you would want to do such a thing.

If it's for speed, it may not be necessary, since modern lisp compilers can
in many cases create very efficient code. You may find that only a tiny
fraction of the code needs to be heavily optimized to gain all the
performance benefits you need. Ask your lisp vendor for info on how to add
declarations to improve your program's efficiency.

If it's for maintainability, it may not be necessary, since the original
lisp will be so much smaller, cleaner, and easier to understand than
automatically translated (or even manually translated) C code.

One powerful argument is programmer productivity: a project in Lisp can be
refined and revised many times where a C program would be stuck with a
relatively frozen design, and take much longer to write. This results in a
product that more closely meets your needs and can be tuned to deliver the
desired performance. This goes well beyond prototyping - it will be much
more adaptable and useful over the extended lifecycle of the product.