On Mon, 11 Oct 2004 14:16:36 -0700, John Meacham
n Mon, Oct 11, 2004 at 12:22:13PM +0100, Malcolm Wallace wrote:
So is it fair to compare the default lazy Haskell solution with all the eager solutions out there that laboriously do all this unnecessary work? Apparently not, so we have gone to all kinds of trouble to slow the Haskell solution down, make it over-strict, do the work N times, and thereby have a "fair" performance test. Huh.
I think the naive way is perfectly fair. If haskell has to live with the disadvantages of lazy evaluation, it only makes sense we should be able to take advantage of the advantages. The fact that haskell doesn't have to compute those intermediate values is a real advantage which should be reflected in the results IMHO. John
This seems especially true if you have to add extra lines of code to make the tests "fair," because this extra code counts against Haskell in the lines-of-code metric. Personally, I am more impressed by the lines-of-code metrics than I am by the performance metrics. - Brian