Re: LISPM I/O performance

["Robert W. Kerns" <RWK%fuji.ila.dialnet.symbolics.com@RELAY.CS.NET>]

    Date: Thu, 25 Jan 90 23:34 PST
    From: Mabry Tyson <TYSON@warbucks.ai.sri.com>
    I don't really know the structures the other processor's editors build
    up but ZMACS does do a good bit of work.  (Do either of those other
    editors allow you to have multiple fonts in the file and display them?)
    In any case, it is still quite slow.  (And beware bumping the mouse into
    the scroll bar when you have a big file!)

Also, if it's a .LISP file (or -*- Mode: Lisp -*- appears at
the top), then it does a bunch of work to partially parse the
input to identify the functions being defined, so that m-.
can work efficiently and with completion.  This takes time,
and probably isn't completely as efficient as it should be.

One thing I will say for LMFS and the FEP FS is that they are
reasonably robust, and quite repairable after filesystem
damage, even without any automatic tools for same.  I have
hand-spliced many dozens of LMFSs and FEPFSs back to usable
shape even after head crashes.  Backups are only current until
the next person writes a file, and it's always nicer to be able
to fix things up than to have to reload.  While I can recover
data from a Mac FS sometimes, it's pretty hopeless to actually
repair the FS.

I've wasted as much time in the last two years fixing Mac
filesystems as I have in the past decade fixing Symbolics
filesystems.  And for a lot less result!