[Haskell-cafe] Re: Shootout favoring imperative code

[Chris Kuklewicz]

igouy at 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