Subject: Re: Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Encyclopedia From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Sat, 27 Oct 2001 17:59:40 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3213194379540444@naggum.net> * "Coby Beck" <cbeck@mercury.bc.ca> | Like Barry said, that description is a widely held belief. Regardless of how widely held the belief, describing _languages_ as requring large memory space and executing programs slowly is very low quality craftsmanship from a CS professional. Any CS professional worth his salt knows that languages, and especially members of the Lisp family past and present, are implemented in many different ways on differnt kinds of computers that make such a blanket generalization embarrassing. | I don't "blame" them at all for echoing an "expert" what else can they | realistically do? They could think a little bit about what it means for a language to take up memory space. It is a very sloppy way to write what they had in mind, even to someone who does not know that much about computers and languages. /// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. -- Richard Hamming