The last time I checked, the naive Lisp will be shorter than the typical C++, but usually much slower. Sometimes you can annotate your code to death for perfor

The last time I checked, the naive Lisp will be shorter than the typical C++, but usually much slower. Sometimes you can annotate your code to death for performance, resulting in something longer than the C++ with more parens, but you still can't trust the compiler to get it right. Fortunately, thanks to DEFMACRO, Lisp lets you write your own optimizing compiler, so as long as your implementation supports your full instruction set, you can do that and achieve better-than-C performance by generating Fortran IV's ugly cousin.