Subject: Re: MD5 in LISP and abstraction inversions
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2001 22:57:20 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3214249058771407@naggum.net>

* Juliusz Chroboczek
| The difference, however, is that most modern implementations of, say, C,
| are pretty much identical from the programmer's point of view.  In most
| cases, C code that is efficient under both gcc/x86 and SunPro/Sparc will
| be efficient on all (modern) platforms.

  But it is fairly unlikely that C code compiled for both IA32 and SPARC
  will be "efficient" in the same way.  If you optimize too much for one of
  them, it is no longer "efficient" in the other.

  I also wonder what "efficient" means to you, and how you determine when
  you have achieved it.  It is not an absolute term.

  As for the use of byte-compiled implementations or code, I completely
  fail to see what their impact on this discussion is.  If you want your
  code to be "efficient", whatever it means, you choose a natively-compiled
  implementation, not a byte-code interpreter, so whatever efficiency
  issues may be perturbed by the existence of a such an implementation
  appear to me completely irrelevant to those who actually seek efficiency.
  
///
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