LISPMs and "real-time"

[davel@whuts.att.com]

Does anyone out there know of a project in which 
 1. the program had to analyze and respond to a signal in a fixed amount
of time (for example, robot control or conversational speech recognition),
and
 2. the program ran continuously on a lispm for days or weeks at
a time, without rebooting, full-gc, or failure to respond within the fixed
amount of time?

Conversely, does anyone have good arguments why this could not be done on 
a lispm?  In LISP at all?

We are under pressure to move our project to a UNIX(R) system -- the
usual "LISP is slow, write it in C" argument.  Could someone be kind
enough to provide some good responses?

Thank you.

David Loewenstern
<davel@whuts.att.com; backbone!{moss || ihnp4}!whuts!davel>
AT&T Bell Laboratories
14B-253
Whippany, NJ 07981