Introduction to efficient coding style in Common Lisp. Document
location: http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/novak/lispeff.html
"Lisp Style and Efficiency" by Gordon S. Novak Jr., Department
of Computer Sciences, Univ. of Texas at Austin "The goals of
this short introductory exercise are to present some basic rules
about efficiency of programs and to present some standard Lisp
idioms that are used in writing efficient code. Readability and
elegance of structure are worth more than 'saving a few
microseconds' in many cases. On the other hand, coding style
that increases the computational complexity of a program can
make it impossible to solve the desired problem, or make the
program so slow that it is not usable in practice. For
motivation, we have provided some small functions, written with
only minor differences in the ways they are coded, but with
striking differences in performance." Also introduces
computational complexity, O(n) notation, and why CONS is
expensive. Explains which functions do CONSing under th