Fast floating-point processing in Common Lisp

Abstract

Lisp, one of the oldest higher-level programming languages, has rarely been used for fast numerical (floatingpoint) computation. We explore the benefits of Common Lisp, an emerging new language standard with some excellent implementations, for numerical computation. We compare it to Fortran in terms of the speed of efficiency of generated code, as well as the structure and convenience of the language. There are a surprising number of advantages to Lisp, especially in cases where a mixture of symbolic and numeric processing is needed.