It's hard to say without knowing the specific benchmarks (and the code). It's certainly easy to do IO (in particular) slowly in Lisp. If one's Lisp has decently optimized read-sequence and write-sequence functions, it's also possible to do it pretty darn fast. One does need to know something about the various functions available to get the best results (e.g. format is incredibly powerful and convenient, but slow. If speed is of the essence, some other output method is called for. And so on.)

I advise against putting too much weight on Graham's opinions. While he's certainly well respected, just as anyone he has his own predelictions and preferences which are entirely personal. For example, one who reads his two books may come out of them with the impression that loop is a bad thing, whereas in the general Common Lisp community, opinions are quite divided on the matter, with extremely well respected people on both sides of the issue. (And actually, ironically enough given that he wrote a book about it, Graham doesn't really seem to like Common Lisp that much at all.)

In reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Specific Examples? - Re: A Macro System for Perl? by hding
in thread A Macro System for Perl? by samtregar

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.