Re: lisp machines vs. lisp on other boxes

[Chris Lindblad <CJL@reagan.ai.mit.edu>]

    Date: 22 May 87 13:37:38 PDT (Fri)
    From: spar!malcolm@decwrl.DEC.COM

	    I have a hard time believing that a standard architecture machine will 
	    be able to simultaneously provide the speed and environment that a lisp
	    machine does. 
    This is precisely the RISC vs CISC issue.  Personally I would very much like
    to see the good parts of the Symbolics programming environment running on
    something like Sun's new RISC chip.  

So would I, but I'm not holding my breath. Building a lisp system from scratch
takes time. For example, last time I checked, lucid doesn't have c-sh-A,
something that was in the lisp machine at least as far back as 1984 (probably
much earlier, but that's when I started using lisp machines) (and you CAN do
it with sun hardware). The instruction set of the processor really has very
little to do with this, except that I doubt it's easier to write a large
lisp system for an existing architecture than it is to design an architecture
for an existing large lisp system.