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From: Robert A Duff <bobduff@world.std.com>
Subject: Re: Matrix Multiplication
Date: 1999/12/15
Message-ID: <wcchfhkxjeg.fsf@world.std.com>#1/1
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Sender: bobduff@world.std.com (Robert A Duff)
References: <385699B5.59C14D03@lmco.com> <01bf4708$99ef98f0$022a6282@dieppe>
Organization: The World Public Access UNIX, Brookline, MA
Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada,comp.lang.fortran
Date: 1999-12-15T00:00:00+00:00
List-Id: <comp.lang.ada>

"Pascal Obry" <pascal_obry@csi.com> writes:

> Well I don't know what is a fast or slow language !!

I do.  A fast language is one for which it is feasible to build
compilers that generate fast code.  A slow language is one for which
that is not feasible.

Also I prefer to put the burden of proof on the language advocates --
that is, a language should be considered "slow" until proven "fast" by
the existence of at least one good production-quality compiler.

By this definition, Smalltalk, for example, is slow -- I've never seen a
Smalltalk compiler that can generate fast code.  Furthermore, it seems
impossible, without doing all code generation at link time, which I
claim is not feasible in many cases.

I don't know whether Fortran is faster than Ada at matrix multiplies,
but it does seem like a meaningful question to ask.  If you measured
lots of compilers, you could learn something useful.

- Bob