[Haskell-cafe] Re: Code and Perf. Data for Prime Finders (was: Genuine Eratosthenes sieve)

[Melissa O'Neill]

Someone asked if I'd include a "classic C" version of the Sieve in my  
comparisons.  Having done so, Lennart wrote (slightly rephrased):
> How did you compare the C version with the Haskell versions? The  
> Haskell programs produce the Nth prime, whereas the C code produces  
> the last prime less than M.

True.  But since I have to know what M is to find the Nth prime, it's  
easy enough to ask the C code to produce the right prime.

> To make the C code to what the Haskell code does you need to set  
> some upper bound that is related to the prime number distribution.   
> I see no trace of this in your code.

The Haskell versions that go up to a limit do this, so I could easily  
have written code to do it -- it's not hard, but has no real bearing  
on the time complexity of the code, so I didn't bother.

You could argue that it's cheating to tell it so blatantly when to  
stop, but I hate the C code I'd found enough that I didn't really  
want to touch it any more than I had to.


A much more legitimate complaint about the comparison with the C code  
is actually on space usage.  It uses much more space than some of the  
algorithms it's competing with.  More about that in an upcoming message.

     Melissa.