Re:Lisp outside the Box (O'Reilly book)
by astine on Thursday July 23, 2009 @07:00PM
(#720559)
That is such a bone-headed analysis, I'm not sure how to respond. If by index, you mean the reference we use to access an element of an array, that is just the physical location of that element in memory with the offset of the array subtracted. (High-level languiges do math under the covers to simplify things for the progammer, but that's basically it.) Lists use the exact same information., except they contain it literally.
Lists are perfect, because they already contain the previous and the after information bit, which is always crucial to us -- we all are enclosed in the time barrier -- and all of other memory alignment and usage, invented by computer scientists, were simply born out of the necessity of speed, and nothing else.
No , they were born because they are much simpler to implement and imagine than linked lists. They continue to be used be used becaue they are faster simpler, and use less space than linked lists.
Nature only uses lists.
No, Nature uses neither lists nor arrays. Atoms, generally are neither fixed in location (as in the case of arrays), nor do they conain the location of their neighbors (as in the case of lists.)
Interconnection is the real reason why computers ne.ver will be able to substitute a human brain -- and this statement (or better: fact) will never grow old...
Simply untrue.
The fact is that both lists and arrays are abstractions really exist outside of computers. One may argue wither whetehr the human brain is or molecules are more organized as a list or an array, but it's a dumb debate.
Lists are perfect, because they already contain the previous and the after information bit, which is always crucial to us -- we all are enclosed in the time barrier -- and all of other memory alignment and usage, invented by computer scientists, were simply born out of the necessity of speed, and nothing else.
No , they were born because they are much simpler to implement and imagine than linked lists. They continue to be used be used becaue they are faster simpler, and use less space than linked lists.
Nature only uses lists.
No, Nature uses neither lists nor arrays. Atoms, generally are neither fixed in location (as in the case of arrays), nor do they conain the location of their neighbors (as in the case of lists.)
Interconnection is the real reason why computers ne.ver will be able to substitute a human brain -- and this statement (or better: fact) will never grow old...
Simply untrue.
The fact is that both lists and arrays are abstractions really exist outside of computers. One may argue wither whetehr the human brain is or molecules are more organized as a list or an array, but it's a dumb debate.