Malcom Wallace wrote:
Since you aren't interested in absolute timings, just the algorithmic complexity, then you could try using a less smart compiler (e.g. nhc98) which will not automatically optimise away the repeated calls.
Thanks very much, I will try this. I'm seriously interested in using Haskell in a commercial venture, and this kind of discussion helps me see what techniques we would have in our toolkit. In the past (20 years of imperative programming) I have occasionally found it useful to be able to get timings for some little function that is in the inner loops of an application. I would be very interested to hear if there are any theoretically pure ways to get timing measurements for a very short-running function. The problem, I think, is that you want to apply the function to the same arguments repeatedly so as not to spend all your time creating arguments. Jeff