Re: Computer Language Shootout

[Preben Randhol <randhol+abuse@pvv.org>]

Craig Carey wrote:
> 
> The Ada entry to read numbers from a file was slow.
>
> The specs for the integer summing program are here: 
>    http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/bench/sumcol/

I don't understand why your code is so complicated: Why not simply do:

   with Ada.Text_IO; use Ada.Text_IO;

   procedure sumcol is
      Sum : Integer := 0;
      Number : String (1 .. 128);
      Last : Natural := 1;
   begin
      while not End_of_Line (Standard_Input) loop
         Get_Line (Standard_Input, Number, Last => Last);
         Sum := Sum + Integer'Value (Number (1 .. Last));
      end loop;

      Put_Line ("Sum: " & Integer'Image (Sum));
   end sumcol;

And the spec above says that the line is only 128 characters wide, so
why do you allocate a string for 4096 ?

> I argue here that the Gcc sumcol entry should be rejected. The C
> programmers assumed that the file's lines were known, thus they
> knew there was only 100 lines. Speed is not important with 100
> lines files, but losing a patch of the competition due to buggy
> code from C programmer might easily be more important.

I cannot see that they used this assumption for the code here:

   http://dada.perl.it/shootout/sumcol.gcc.html

> That says programs "can assume" that each line has no more than 128
> characters. Thus checking can be omitted and a crash is OK. A quite 
> different wording was used in the specs, for lines containing 2
> integers.
>
> The specs author, Mr Bagley wrote that the programs "should" read
> integers "line by line". The C programmers in fact were never told
> whether to use the first integer or the 2nd (if there are two or
> more). Also they were required to read an integer when there was
> none, which suggests error checking but their C code has none.

I find the spec a bit unclear about this. As I understand it and this
seems to be the way most implementations are done, is that one can
expect one integer per line.

-- 
Ada95 is good for you.
http://www.crystalcode.com/codemage/MainMenu/Coding/Ada/IntroducingAda.php