🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <3170B180.51A8@concentric.net> "Alan L. Lovejoy" <alovejoy@concentric.net> writes:
>....
>But these specialized processors suffered the same fate as the infamous
>"LISP machines." The commerical RISC processors ate their lunch, for several 
>reasons: 

>1. The general purpose RISCs would run all software, not just Smalltalk
>or LISP.

It may be a little-known fact that some Lisp machines did
have compilers for Fortran, Pascal, Ada, Prolog, and C.  By
far the best development environments for these languages 
were to be found on Lisp hardware in the late 80s (except for 
C, because they ran out of steam before getting around to 
making a decent collection of libraries available). 

>2. They were often faster than the special purpose processors, because
>more resources were expended in their design and manufacture--because
>the return on investment was higher.

I think this is correct, but only for general-purpose uses.  
For example, a Lisp machine wouldn't run C programs very
fast, because its design was optimized for Lisp, whereas  
"general-purpose" hardware is more or less optimized for
C, and doesn't run Lisp very fast.  But the raw clock rates 
of conventional hardware did get cranked up high much
sooner, for the reasons you mention, and hence their per-
formance for Lisp (or Smalltalk) is generally adequate.  

>3. The world wanted to standardize on MS-DOS and UNIX.

This begs the question of "why?"  If anyone can answer 
that accurately, they'll probably be a billionaire before long.

>Another point to consider: Smalltalk (and LISP) would probably benefit from 
>a Java processor as much as would Java itself.  At the "bytecode" level,
>syntax differences and static typing are no longer relevant.

Excellent point.  Anyone know how many bits are in a Java
machine word?



~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
William D. Gooch
RothWell International
goochb@rwi.com
Texas liaison for the International Programmers Guild
For information on IPG, see http://www.ipgnet.com/ipghome.htm
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~