Ha..  of course, the real problem is that Java and Python are actually doing all of the work to compute their trigonometric functions, while C libraries that Lisp uses probably have them mapped into a table.<p>Java does actually keep a table for trig functions on small values -- they just haven't widened the table definition, which is filed as a bug at <a href="http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5005861" rel="nofollow">http://bugs.sun.com/bugdatabase/view_bug.do?bug_id=5005861</a><p>"I just performed some simple benchmarks of my own, and noticed that summing e.g. sqrt, sin and tan for small values are just as fast as their C equivalents.  This was a great relief to me.<p>However, when computing sin in the range of pi/2 ... pi and 10 ... 10+pi/6 Java became 3-5 times slower, while the C program was just as fast.  This is explained above by lack of precision, but for example sin(10.0) yields bit-to-bit exactly the same result in Java and C!  This comparison was performed on a rather old 1GHz Mobile Intel Pentium, so I would assume that the precision has been fixed in virtually all modern processors, and therefore these operations could be intrinsified for a much larger value range (possibly the entire double range)."