enlightenment

[Rusty@Cassiopeia.Mystech.Dialnet.Symbolics.COM (Rusty Johnson)]

    Date: Thu, 22 Feb 90 22:38 EST
    From: jka@vega.crd.ge.com (Jim Aragones)

    Would anyone care to try and tell me why the first function takes over 5
    minutes and about 800,000 words to compile, yet the second one, which
    merely defines local functions to do the work, compiles instantly?   It
    is very annoying either having to wait an hour to compile a file OR
    having to fill your code with bogus functions to get it to compile in a
    reasonable amount of time.

	[...]

We have noticed a similar problem, but did not try this work around. I did some
investigation in why the "faster" one was indeed faster. I just did m-X Macro
Expand Expression All on the "(with-character-style (style stream ...) ...)" form
in each of your examples, the results are as follows:

	"fast" one:  ~ 8 seconds
	"slow" one:  ~ 81 seconds
	
These numbers are from a 1meg 3640, but the ratio feels about the same as a
similar test on one of 5meg 3650's.
	
I would suspect that the "slow" one is producing more code that means actual
compilation will also be slower.

	-Rusty