This is my report.

How each objective was met

     1. Porting my Allegro LISP Quoridor game-player to Borland C++ Builder
     2. Documenting the primary differences in code and data strucures.
     3. Improving upon the implementation in instances of poor original design.
     4. Analyzing several differences between the two languages.
     5. Comparing the efficiency of the two implementations.

Areas of study

Differences in Code Structure
Differences in Project Feasibility

Porting my Allegro LISP Quoridor game-player to Borland C++ Builder

After spending some time with the environments of Visual C++ and C++ Builder, I felt that the Borland environment was more intuitive. (In my opinion, it has a "feel" very much like Visual Basic, so it may be "intuitive" to VB users...) So I chose Borland's C++ Builder over Microsoft's Visual C++.

Differences between Lisp and C++

I don't believe that my recognition of these obvious differences approaches "analysis," but the immediately obvious difference between C++ and Lisp is C++'s inability to naturally handle "cars" and "cdrs." C++ must be taught to handle these tools, which are the foundation of the Lisp programming language. I "taught" C++ about "cars" and "cdrs" by writing a linked-list class. This class is here (first version C++), and here (second C++ version).
Other than that, the only differences that really struck me were Lisp's use of "nil," and C++'s very, very handy incrementing tool- the "++" symbol.

Comparing the efficiency of the two implementations.

The C++ version is much faster than the Lisp version, but that is largely due to the differences between Borland's and Allegro's GUI handling. Furthermore, our version of Allegro Common Lisp provides no actual compiler, so the Lisp is interpreted. This is undoubtedly the biggest factor affecting Lisp's apparent speed problem, relative to C++. I wrote two identical programs in order to perform timed execution tests for some of the Quoridor code. These identical programs have running times of 27 seconds (Lisp) and 5 seconds (C++). (The C++ version of this program is available here.)

Differences in Code Structure

In retrospect, I believe that this game takes little advantage of the symbolic processing aspects of the Lisp language, and uses more of a number-crunching approach. For most of the program, I could look at Lisp, and translate directly into C++. For something like "Eliza," this would not be possible. For "Quoridor," this was intuitive. Once I had a generic linked list class available, portation was almost a direct translation. The necessity of this class introduced the largest single difference between the Lisp and C++ code. After that, the next biggest level of difference came from the replacement of "cond" statements with "if-else" constructs.

Differences in Project Feasibility

Now that the coding is complete, I can say with surety that the largest effects on project feasibility (in this instance) come from the programming environment, and not from the languages themselves. I am quite confident that this project is equally feasible in Lisp and in C++, but I enjoyed Borland's environment, and I experienced many difficulties with Allegro's. Lisp is valuable, and well worth knowing, however, so I do not regret my experience with it in the least. I just regret that my experience had to come through Allegro.