From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,189a28164788ed2e X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2001-11-02 22:50:21 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!news1.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!cyclone.bc.net!sjcppf01.usenetserver.com!e420r-sjo4.usenetserver.com!usenetserver.com!newshub2.rdc1.sfba.home.com!news.home.com!news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com.POSTED!not-for-mail From: tmoran@acm.org Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: Computer Language Shootout References: X-Newsreader: Tom's custom newsreader Message-ID: Date: Sat, 03 Nov 2001 06:50:20 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 24.7.82.199 X-Complaints-To: abuse@home.net X-Trace: news1.rdc1.sfba.home.com 1004770220 24.7.82.199 (Fri, 02 Nov 2001 22:50:20 PST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 02 Nov 2001 22:50:20 PST Organization: Excite@Home - The Leader in Broadband http://home.com/faster Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:15718 Date: 2001-11-03T06:50:20+00:00 List-Id: Just looking at some of the benchmark examples gives me a headache. The author himself gives some of the reasons they are "lies, damned lies, and benchmarks". Most are small, so comprehensibility of code is untested. Speed is the most important thing, and you are apparently supposed to do things the same way as the other programming language versions, so you are pretty much left testing a particular compiler's code generator or library routines (eg reading lines of text). He allows tricks like reading the entire source file in one operation, then scanning it from memory, which is not testing the same thing as multiple single-line reads. His lines-of-code metric, which he admits is terrible, counts non-comment source lines, so there's a strong pressure to avoid white space. In the example with threads he mentions that a solution using Python's synchronized Queue class is not legitimate - I presume that means one couldn't use the obvious Ada solution with protected types, but would have to ignore that Ada advantage. etc etc etc