On 21 September 2012 07:30, Andrei Alexandrescu < seewebsiteforem...@erdani.org> wrote:
> I don't quite agree. This is a domain in which intuition is having a hard > time, and at least some of the responses come from an intuitive standpoint, > as opposed from hard data. > > For example, there's this opinion that taking the min, max, and average is > the "fair" thing to do and the most informative. I don't think this is a 'fair' claim, the situation is that different people are looking for different statistical information, and you can distinguish it with whatever terminology you prefer. You are only addressing a single use case; 'benchmarking', by your definition. I'm more frequently interested in profiling than 'benchmark'ing, and I think both are useful to have. The thing is, the distinction between 'benchmarking' and 'profiling' is effectively implemented via nothing more than the sampling algorithm; min vs avg, so is it sensible to expose the distinction in the API in this way?