Re: A Dylan implemented on Common Lisp

[A.Sloman@cs.bham.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman)]

andrew@cee.hw.ac.uk (Andrew Dinn) writes:

> ....
> I can attack Common Lisp without defending Dylan. Common Lisp almost
> killed of lisp application development because i) the fact that it is
> such a fat language (thanks to all those proponents of {Mac, Inter,
> Franz, Zeta, Foo, Bar, ...}Lisp who wanted all their favourite
> features retained) combined with ii) the fact that all this fat
> functionality was not layered as a series of libraries included as and
> when you need them. The consequence of Common Lisp being defined as a
> ball of mud was that a full Common Lisp implementation required, circa
> 1988, about 12 Mb of VMem before you even started defining your own
> functions.

This memory hunger was surely more a matter of implementations than
of the language.

Poplog common lisp can run in under 4 Mbytes (and that includes the
VED editor and full Pop-11 compiler). I seem to recall that Procyon
common lisp was even more compact.

Aaron
---
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Aaron Sloman, ( http://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/~axs )
School of Computer Science, The University of Birmingham, B15 2TT, England
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