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Aucbvax.4905 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Mon Nov 2 08:47:59 1981 hairy data structures in LISP >From cbosgd!mark@Berkeley Mon Nov 2 08:38:15 1981 So basically what you're saying is that if you have one of the LISPs you mentioned with arrays (I wonder what "Standard LISP" is?), and if you're willing to use a macro that makes a record reference look like a function, and you're willing to give up any compile time or runtime type checking, and if you have a compiler that is very smart about handling array references with constant subscripts, then you can get something that works as well as a dumb Pascal compiler would produce.

You can add features to any language, and people will no doubt prefer their own favorite programming language because they know it well, just like they prefer their own favorite editor. The point is that Lisp does not provide any built in advantages for a real language editor, since the built in trees are not the structure you really want. Note also that you may want trees that sit on permanent disk files and are paged in for editing (after all, you're editing a disk file which should probably be a tree) and that existing LISP implementations (to my knowledge) are entirely based on primary memory.

On the other hand, for implementing a user extensible system, LISP is very well suited. The reason for this is that a large subset of LISP can be implemented in a short time. I used LISP as the language for writing attribute grammar evaluation functions in my thesis, because I could write an interpreter for in quickly (I spent 4 days on it). Similarly, there are implementation of EMACS that you program in LISP. This doesn't mean I particularly like LISP, just that I didn't want to spend months designing and building an interpreter for some other language.

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