Wednesday, August 07, 2002

The fifth ICFP programming contest starts at the end of this month. It's part of ICFP 2002, the International Conference on Functional Programming. I was part of the Dylan Hackers team in ICFP 2001.  We came second with our entry in the Dylan programming language. We used the open source Gwydion Dylan compiler and I also used Functional Developer, a commercial Win32 Dylan development system, for debugging and testing. I'm looking forward to being involved again this year. 10:18:27 AM

From Lambda. Microsoft have an embedded Prolog interpreter in Windows NT to configure the network systems. 10:12:16 AM

Lemonodor has some interesting information on performance comparisons between Common Lisp and C. I've always found the difference in speed between my C and Common Lisp programs to be close enough to not be important. The speed advantage of developing in Common Lisp wins out at the end of the day. The same goes for using Dylan. My only reason for using C these days is for low memory applications. For example, programming on the Nokia 9210 I only have 2-3MB of memory to play with and the less used the better so other applications can run. I'm working on finding/getting a Lisp to operate with a small enough footprint for this. Currently I'm using Forth for this application space as even that is better than C for this type of development. 10:01:59 AM