I was just skimming the LispWorks documentation and am confused by the 
section on "Native threads on Mac OS X" <http://tinyurl.com/ygflyq>, in 
particular, the sentence:

Lisp code can only run in one thread at a time and uses a lock to 
enforce this.

I'm not sure I know what this means but it sounds bad to me.  <pause> 
What does this mean?  Every line of lisp code executed has to 
acquire/release a mutex?  That can't be.  Help?

Damien Kick <dkixk@earthlink.net> writes:

> I was just skimming the LispWorks documentation and am confused by the
> section on "Native threads on Mac OS X" <http://tinyurl.com/ygflyq>,
> in particular, the sentence:
>
> Lisp code can only run in one thread at a time and uses a lock to
> enforce this.
>
> I'm not sure I know what this means but it sounds bad to me.  <pause>
> What does this mean?  Every line of lisp code executed has to
> acquire/release a mutex?  That can't be.  Help?

It means that Lisp code can run on only one processor at a time.

Bill Atkins wrote:
> Damien Kick <dkixk@earthlink.net> writes:
> 
>> I was just skimming the LispWorks documentation and am confused by the
>> section on "Native threads on Mac OS X" <http://tinyurl.com/ygflyq>,
>> in particular, the sentence:
>>
>> Lisp code can only run in one thread at a time and uses a lock to
>> enforce this.
>>
>> I'm not sure I know what this means but it sounds bad to me.  <pause>
>> What does this mean?  Every line of lisp code executed has to
>> acquire/release a mutex?  That can't be.  Help?
> 
> It means that Lisp code can run on only one processor at a time.

<nod> OK, that makes more sense to me.  Thanks.