Re: Java vs Ada 95 (Was Re: Once again, Ada absent from DoD SBIR solicitation)

[jsa@alexandria (Jon S Anthony)]

In article <32776D5D.5768@gsfc.nasa.gov> Stephen Leake <Stephen.Leake@gsfc.nasa.gov> writes:

> Kenneth Almquist wrote:
> > [snip]
> >
> > There may be no distributed overhead, but there certainly is overhead.
> > Here are some numbers from a toy benchmark:
> > 
> >         Ada with Unbounded_String:  10.02 seconds
> >         Icon (interpreted):          1.45 seconds
> > 
> > [snip]
> > 
> > I suspect that automatic garbage collection is required to implement
> > unbounded strings efficiently.  In Icon, the assignment "b := a" can
> > be performed by simply copying a pointer.
> 
> If Icon is assigning pointers, and Ada is copying values, these are NOT
> comparable benchmarks! To get a real comparison, the semantics must
> match.

Huh?  Of course the semantics match - at the programmers level!  Which
is all that matters in this case.  These are _completely_ comparable
benchmarks - they do the same task in virtually the same user level
coding style.  The difference is "simply" one of quality of service
and this comes in large part from the Icon technique for string
storage management (which is GC based).

You could do something similar for an Unbounded_String impl, and then
you would have a specific type which had GC in your implementation.
But it would not be based on malloc/adjusting/copying/freeing (which
will never be able to compete here).

/Jon
-- 
Jon Anthony
Organon Motives, Inc.
Belmont, MA 02178
617.484.3383
jsa@organon.com