lisp->C case histories

["David A. Moon" <Moon@STONY-BROOK.SCRC.SYMBOLICS.COM>]

    Date: Mon, 16 Oct 89 10:44:10 PDT
    From: lakin@csli.Stanford.EDU (Fred Lakin)
    
    I am compiling case histories of large lisp programs that were
    translated into C.

To make this good science, you should try to separate the effects
of rewriting in C from rewriting period.  For example, if a program
was first written in Lisp, then rewritten in C, and got faster as
a result, some of the speedup can be attributed to C, some might be
attributable to faster hardware made accessible by the use of C, and
some can be attributed to what one learns from rewriting a program.
I doubt that any controlled experiments have been conducted where
two teams competed to rewrite a program, one using Lisp and the other
using C, but the results of such an experiment would certainly be
interesting.

Personally I believe that one ought to use C for what C is good for
and Lisp for what Lisp is good for, and dispense with the religious
wars.