number of arguments limitation

[JonL.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA]

Re: your msg of 1 Mar 83  00:14 EST

I think you're right about the performance penalty when a
VAX lisp skirts using CALLS in a natural way; unfortunately, hard
data  don't come easily on this point.  Perhaps one could compare,
not just raw runtimes, but rather the percentage of runtime spent
in the function-to-function linkage on some typical benchmarks
(TAK comes to mind but . . . ).   I'd expect VAX/NIL to have a
modest value here, Interlisp/VAX to be moderately larger, and
Spice/LISP (as currently implemented) to be quite large on this
measure.