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I love the idea of trying to build a mathematically pure language. I wonder how far it is possible to use optimisation techniques to make Bel efficient. For example, can the representation of strings as pairs be automatically optimised to a sequence of characters?

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One thing you can say for Bel for sure is that it will give implementors lots of opportunities to develop new optimization techniques. That's partly humorously euphemistic, but also true.

Yes, I believe lisps virtually always do that in practice, as does Haskell if you use certain string types (fp languages have their roots to lisp even though they have different syntax).

But lisps are dynamically typed, so to make them run fast you'd need to use a speculating jit compiler like GraalVM. They're more like python, performance wise without it.

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