Scheme compilers

[James A. Crippen]

Considering the wide availability of Scheme->C compilers, possibly I
should just use C as an intermediate language and make the last pass of
the compilers be gcc.  After all, even Dennis Ritchie admits to the
usefulness of C as a 'portable assembler' [Ritchie 1996], which it
certainly is good at.  Unfortunately, there comes the question of
efficiency.  Which compiler out there seems to generate the fastest code?
(Of couse, that's a loaded question.)  I know that there are lots of
tricks used in the conversion process, especially those which convert
recursive idiom to iterative idiom since most processors today are
horrible at handling recursion.  Does anyone have a favorite?

Is there any way that I might be able to get my hands on some of the old
Lispm code?  Of course Symbolics is going to be a little uptight about
theirs, but there must be some way of getting ahold of system code used on
the LMI and TI Lispms, both of which appear to be long defunct.  (Of
course, even better would be to have my own, but nobody gives them away
for free, and even if they did the shipping costs up here would be
horrendous.)

[Ritchie 1996] D. Ritchie, The Development of the C Programming Language,
History of Programming Languages II, ACM Press: New York, 1996.

cheers,
james

--
James A. Crippen, CS/Math tenured undergrad	<<Lambda calculus	.-.
crippenj@saturn.math.uaa.alaska.edu		  uber alles!>>		   \
If the future isn't what it used to be, does that mean that the past	   /\
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