Thanks to all for your answers!

With "return $!" the program now works "as expected".

Forcing Int, and moving the "let b" in the "else" part, also brings some (but comparatively far less) improvement.

Note that, as indicated in my initial post, this program is a *modified* version of "Man or boy", and therefore it does not return the same values.

Best,

Antoine

2017-01-26 14:32 GMT+01:00 Frank Staals <frank@fstaals.net>:

Antoine Rimlet <antoine.rimlet@gmail.com> writes:

> Hi list,
>
> I try to get the following little program (a slightly modified "Man or
> boy", it prints -14254067) work "as expected", that is, without consuming
> lots of memory

Are you sure "-14254067" is correct for k=22? Wikipedia [1] and
RosettaCode [2] both seem to suggest that -865 609 is the right
answer. Similarly, for k=10 it is supposed to return -67 rather than -577.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_or_boy_test
[2] http://rosettacode.org/wiki/Man_or_boy_test

--

- Frank