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Re: Elisp development news


From: Neil Jerram
Subject: Re: Elisp development news
Date: 04 Jan 2002 14:51:11 +0000
User-agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7

>>>>> "Marius" == Marius Vollmer <address@hidden> writes:

    Marius> It will affect performance, but I expect it to yield only
    Marius> a small performance hit.  I expect that, at worst, a test
    Marius> for falseness will turn from a comparison with a constant
    Marius> to two comparisons with one constant and one global
    Marius> variable.

I guess so.  I was confused by Jim's suggestion for redefining EQ(x,y)
in the Emacs code, and thinking that this meant changing SCM_EQ_P
similarly in Guile.  But in fact we don't need to change SCM_EQ_P at
all, just tests against SCM_BOOL_F and SCM_EOL.  And, even then, we
don't need to change ALL tests against SCM_BOOL_F or SCM_EOL, only
those involved in the processing of `if', `cond', `or', `and', `list?'
and so on.  So the performance impact should indeed be much less than
I was imagining.

    >> The question is whether the Elisp nil value should be distinct from
    >> the `nil' symbol.  I presume yes (from your argument below) but just
    >> wanted to check.  If yes, I further presume that the nil value should
    >> be a new SCM_MAKIFLAG value; is that right?

    Marius> Yes, that what I thought so far.  However, it might be better to 
make
    Marius> nil a real symbol (i.e., satisfying our current SCM_SYMBOLP) and
    Marius> somehow play tricks with the heap segments to still get a constant
    Marius> value for the nil value (but I wouldn't know off-hand how to do this
    Marius> portably).

I don't see why it's useful for the Elisp nil value to satisfy
Scheme's `symbol?'.  (Obviously it must satisfy Elisp's `symbolp', but
that's a different matter.)  So I think the SCM_MAKIFLAG is the way to
go, and faster because it is a constant.

        Neil




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