[Haskell-cafe] Shootout favoring imperative code

[Chris Kuklewicz]

Brent Fulgham wrote:
> 
> --- Chris Kuklewicz <haskell at list.mightyreason.com>
> wrote:
> 
> 
>>Also about sum-file: They do not reveal what the
>>actual 8k test file contains.  So there is no way
>>to reproduce the benchmark locally for testing.
>>(One can learn it totals 400000, but since
>>negative numbers are allowed, this does not help
> 
> much).
> 
> It's created by catting the example file together
> multiple times.  I'll update the page to be more clear
> about
> this, and I can send you the actual file used on the
> test
> machine if you want.

That is what I did as a hack.  Nice to see I guessed right.  Right now I
use a 1,680,000 line (concatenated) version to get the processing times
large enough to discern small improvements.

>>Apparantly it is bottlenecked by parsing strings
>>into integers, but they specify "Programs should use
>>built-in line-oriented I/O functions rather
>>than custom-code." which means the programmer's
>>hands are completely tied.  So it is just a
> 
> benchmark of the 
> 
>>build-in library function, not
>>of any algorithm the programmer provides.
> 
> 
> Yes -- it was designed as a test of the standard I/O
> system.
> 
> -Brent
> 

I assumed that that I could use getContents, like the previously
accepted Haskell entry.  It returns the entire stdin as a single (lazy)
string, so it is technically not "line oriented".  But it is certainly a
"standard I/O system" for Haskell.  I'll submit my improved version soon.

-- 
Chris