Re: Yes, they are special, but...

[Brad Miller <miller@CS.ROCHESTER.EDU>]

    Date: Fri, 9 Jun 89 14:04 PDT
    From: pwtc!hamscher@labrea.stanford.edu (Walter Hamscher)

    Right, let's cut the doubletalk.

    Symbolics machines are the general-purpose machines because they
    deal with symbols, structured objects, and numbers equally well.

    It's all those other guys that are specialized because they only
    do arithmetic well and take relative performance hits to do the rest.

Then why is Latex 20x slower (or worse) than a unix box? Genera is doing
*something* poorly.... maybe it's just the Pascal compiler. But that just
point up the issue of trying to compete with boxes where there are thousands
of programmers generating applications/languages/etc. vs. one in which there
are at most a couple hundred. So "general purpose" here means something like
providing an environment with a lot of tools that work pretty well, vs. one
in which LISP is terrific but other things, well... I'm getting tired of
Zmail bugs, how about you?