igouy@yahoo.com wrote:
There is no need to beat a dead horse, though. This benchmark sets out to test fgets / atoi, and that is all. There are better benchmarks to spend time on.
You can say that again!
Ah..sarcasm, I know that one. Actually, I submitted a slightly faster sum-file entry for Haskell tonight. So I did kick the horse around, and I learned how to use -funbox-strict-fields.
Is a persecution complex required for Haskell programming :-)
The sum-file benchmark is not about my cleverness. It is designed to test the language's library routines. I quote Brent:
Yes -- it was designed as a test of the standard I/O system.
-Brent
See...It is like the "startup" benchmark -- which just tests how long it takes to start the program (and print "Hello World.").
ackermann, sum-file, random, startup (aka hello world) are all left-over from the old Doug Bagley Great Computer Language Shootout - they are just little snippets of nothing that provide an easy starting point - takfp and harmonic are much the same.
takfp and ackerman and harmonic can be good tests of how well the langauage handles recursion.
I'm waiting for the complaints that binary-trees was designed to favour functional programming languages ;-)
;-) == sarcasm
best wishes, Isaac
Cheers, Chris