On Apr 8, 2004, at 10:47 AM, Oleg Trott wrote:

> Actually, any decent Lisp implementation compiles to native code (like 
> Fortran or C/C++). In my experience, after you add a bunch of type 
> declarations to Lisp, it runs about as fast as OCaml native, but it 
> runs interactively (with eval and everything). The issues of
>
> 1. compilation to native code
> 2. interactivity & runtime eval
> 3. strict typing (i.e. variables have types, not values)
>
> are all orthogonal. Lisp provides 1 & 2, Ocamlopt provides 1 & 3, 
> Ocaml (toplevel) provides 2 & 3, which covers all possible 
> combinations of 2 out of 3. I think SML/NJ gives all 3, but I don't 
> use it, so I'm not sure.

The latency for an interactive top-level that does native compilation 
is a bit high, but Lisp systems are certainly impressive in that you 
can interactively disassemble your functions.

SML/NJ has all 3, but not as conveniently as Lisp systems, and like 
many Lisp systems (and unlike OCaml), it doesn't support generating 
stand-alone native binaries.  Also like many Lisp systems, it only 
supports 32-bit platforms (there is Alpha support, but it's a 32-bit 
kludge).

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