From: David Masover <ninja@...>
Date: 2010-01-05T03:42:32+09:00
Subject: Re: Ruby in Lisp, preLisp

On Sunday 03 January 2010 10:28:39 am Ruli Lupy wrote:
>  so you pay the price of having to specify the first argument, for
> example the following Lisp code to collect the lines from a file.
> 
>    (let (lines)
>          (f.each-line "my.file" line (push "line" lines))
>     lines)
> 
>  you obtain some speed up, because f.each-line is a macro and get
> translated
> into Lisp code.

That would speed up that specific example, but I don't think you could do it 
in any sort of generic way. Consider these uses:

x = lambda{|line| puts line}
File.open{|f| f.each(&x) }

Or:

File.open do |f|
  lines = f.each_line
  while (line = lines.next)
    if need_next_line_now?
      next_line = niles.next
    end
  end
end

Or:

class File
  def every_other_line
    lines = self.each_line
    begin
      loop do
        lines.next
        yield lines.next
      end
    rescue StopIteration
    end
  end
end

There are all sorts of interesting ways you can use blocks which are 
definitely more like lambdas (which Lisp has), and less like macros.

There are also plenty of tricks you can do with Lisp macros that you can't 
really do with Ruby blocks. At best, you can fake it by going back and re-
parsing that code.

>   The idea is that you can translate Ruby to Lisp in this way and get
> some
> more speed

Great! More speed for Ruby is generally a good thing...

> but the syntax requires a little more typing.

Well, that kind of kills one of the biggest advantages of Ruby in the first 
place:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duck_typing

And you don't necessarily have to specify types explicitly to get the 
performance advantages of static typing, or even of native compiled code:

http://code.google.com/p/v8/