> Thanks. I'm actually reading this book and do find it readable and > practical. Yet, I can't read such a book from cover to cover without > any practice. I find that simple daily tasks to be a good practice.
> I just wonder regarding your recommendation against plist for storing > my strucutre. Practical Lisp clearly recommends Hash Tables for large > tables and plists/alists for small tables for efficiency reasons.
> May you please elaborate?
It's all in the constants.
Access time to sequential structures like p-lists or a-lists is O(N), with N=number of entries, while for hash-table, it's anything between O(1) and O(log(N)), which is much better. But really, it's only better when N -> +infinity, because for hash-table you must spend a lot of time computing the hash value for the key (with SXHASH), it's usually slower than comparing a few keys in the lists, and "few" can be as high as 50, depending on the test function (EQL hash is faster than EQUALP hash).
