Re: Is octave good to do image processing?

Thiophene <bitterlemon40@xxxxxxxx> writes:

Fair enough, I have not had too much experience of using Lisp. I do
feel however it is one of those languages that have occurred because
it made life very, very easy for the person who wrote the first
compiler - ie. get the programmer to do most of the work - ie. lazy
compiler writer. Anyway I like my maths straight.

This may have been true 50 or so years ago to some extent. AFAIK Lisp
was originally introduced as a notation by some AI guys to specify
programs to their assembler programmers. Soon someone discovered that
it is not too difficult to write an interpreter for this notation ...

But in any case I consider it untrue that a Lisp program is more
difficult than a C or C++ program for a given general task. If you
doubt this, I suggest to take a look at SICP (Structure and
Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman) and show
me how their stuff could be easier implemented in another language.
They have a website:

http://swiss.csail.mit.edu/classes/6.001/abelson-sussman-lectures/

The 3 main problems I have are:
1) accessing video and sound data without writing a mass of supporting
code.
2) modern languages and compilers are completely cache unaware. They
do not support in any way optimal use of the L1 and L2 caches.
3) they do not provide unordered loops and other statements to
transparently make use of the power of multi-core processors, from 2
core x86's to 128 core Nvidia CUDA processors.
....

Well, we were speaking originally about frontends for DSP, not about
compilers that allow you to exploit the full power of your hardware.

You know what languages hardware drivers are written in by the
manufacturers, the community of Lisp programmers is probably a few
orders of magnitude smaller than that of C programmers, no really big
firms pushing Lisp technology forwards--- so what could one expect?

(Scheme compilers mostly allow to produce binaries with about the
speed of C++ programs. But there are cases where C programs are
outperformed. Similar with Common Lisp AFAIK.)

--
hw

.

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