Why don't people like lisp?

[prunesquallor at comcast.net]

"Andrew Dalke" <adalke at mindspring.com> writes:


> I was never any good at Intel assembly, and I thankfully haven't
> touched it in about 15 years.  I was trying to figure out if it
> optimized the additions into 15**a, but I could see neither the
> sequence 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 nor the value 15 (octal 17, hex F) anywhere
> in the code.  Pointers?

When you read the raw machine code you have to remember that
entities are tagged.  I believe line 52

    52: b0 3c       movb	al,$60

is the relevant one.  60 = 15 * 4, so it seems that this
implementation represents fixnums by shifting left by two.