Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by pjmlp 1482 days ago
Since the mid-70's that Lisps support vectors....
1 comments

I know that, but that wasn't my point. Yes, all major Lisps support vectors; but they all use lists a lot more than they use vectors. One of Lisp's major features is "code as data", but that code is almost all lists of lists (as opposed to vectors of vectors). I was talking about a Lisp-like language in which vectors, not lists, are the primary data structure. Possibly even one which doesn't have cons cells at all, only vectors. I am suggesting such a language might possibly work better in severely memory poor environments than a more traditional Lisp would.
Then you're also aware that one of the beautiful things of Lisp is how it allows to abstract the hardware beyond the core primitives, there is nothing that prevents an optimizing Lisp compiler to map what looks like lists to vectors at the machine code level.

One reason why such optimization isn't common is most likely due to the current usage of Lisp across the industry, and the commercial implementations being a niche product.