Obsession
Josef Eschgfaeller
Erik Naggum wrote:
> while mankind creates communities and tries to solve huge problems,
> programmers are obsessing about the execution time and internal
> representation of LENGTH on strings, just to take a random
> sampling from today's set of problems
Oh sorry, I felt already in guilt. I was not so much obsessed
as confused, because after a remark in Graham's "On Lisp" that
calculating the length of a list means to traverse it I was not
sure how it would be for strings. And I discovered also
array-in-bounds-p late, and until then I didn't know how to stop
when going through a string. I have here Steele's and Graham's
books on my desk, and before writing to the newsgroup, I look there,
but I have no experience in Lisp implementation nor experts
around to ask. I'll teach a course on Lisp in autumn and would
like to know things well.
Anyway, I thought, today is sunday, so I can pose an easier
question :-)
J. Eschgfaeller
University of Ferrara
Erik Naggum
| Oh sorry, I felt already in guilt.
hey, it was nothing personal. I admit I exaggerated your question, but
we've had people here who have been obsessing about way-too-low-level
performance, and yours was the closest at hand.
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century