Is Maxima modular?...(and/or How learn source code?...)

On Mon, 31 Mar 2003, Stavros Macrakis wrote:

> > Also remember that you're talking about code that was written
> > around the 1970s, when processor speeds were under a MHz,
> 
> Yes, the code was mostly developed on the PDP-6 and the KA-10 model of
> the PDP-10, which ran at about 0.3-0.5 mips.  Because of both speed and
> space restrictions, compiled code (originally, interpreted code, too)
> was run without error checking -- so that many basic Lisp operations --
> NULL, CAR, CDR, EQ, RPLACA, RPLACD, function call -- took only one
> machine instruction.

Just for comparison, I'm currently working with a Beowulf cluster: 128 2.4
GHz processors, 256 GBytes RAM - and I'm still having to do some of the
same sort of "kludges", 'cause the properly object-oriented & modular code
the last person designed was at least 2 orders of magnitude too slow to do
the job.

Never fails, they give you a faster machine, and they give you bigger
problems to go along with it :-)

James