Home Original page

stackless python

Michael Hudson mwh at python.net
Thu Jan 3 05:24:23 EST 2002 
bokr at accessone.com (Bengt Richter) writes:

> On Wed, 02 Jan 2002 13:52:47 -0500, Justin Sheehy <justin at iago.org> wrote:
> 
> >Michael Hudson <mwh at python.net> writes:
> >
> >>> The thing I don't fully understand is that several Scheme
> >>> implementations are both smaller and faster than Python.
> >>
> >> Less dynamism, I think.  I'm not sure what the standard says about
> >> things like
> >>
> >> (define (func x y) (+ x y))
> >> (set! + -)
> >> (display (func 2 3))
> >>
> >> but I'd bet at least some implementations would print "5".
> >

> FWIW, here's an oldie (came on 5 1/4" floppy in "PC Scheme Trade
> Edition" book from MIT press 1990, by Texas Instruments)
> 
> Note the difference in results at [3] and [4]:

That was what I was expecting, at least some of the time.
[...]

> >It's hard to show that _none_ of them do that, but on the ones I 
> >have handy:
[lots of -1's]
> >At least a good portion of Scheme implementations support this level
> >of dynamism.  At least a couple of those are pretty darn efficient
> >compared to CPython.

Were any of those compiling the code?

> >So I'd venture that while there may be "less
> >dynamism" in some real sense, it isn't as simple a difference as 
> >you imply.

I wouldn't want anyone to think I claimed it was simple; it was just
an example.

It may be almost a social thing; the sort of code one writes in scheme
may be easier to compile efficiently than the sort of code one writes
in Python.

This is getting into meaningless wibble territory anyway, so I'm going
to stop.

Cheers,
M.
More information about the Python-list mailing list