Re: Gabriel benchmarks in Scheme

[fateman@renoir.Berkeley.EDU (Richard Fateman)]

The guts of the FRPOLY benchmark was written by the late 
Prof. William A. Martin, of MIT, c. 1968.  That is, before
many people reading this were born, and when the Mathlab group was
concerned with other issues than those we face today in
programming and teaching programming.

I think that the part that causes
the most difficulty in understanding is in the middle
of the polynomial multiplication routine. A more straightforward
program, such as the one in Scheme given in Abelson/Sussman^2,
can use O(n^2) rather than O(n) conses in multiplying two degree-n 
polynomials compared to Martin's program.

I find it unfortunate that people feel they have to understand code
in MacLisp in order to translate it into Scheme.
Can't this be done automatically?