I think the benchmarks are flawed in an important way, I believe, (but am not positive) that ARPREC uses a special factorized form of representing numbers, which makes multiplicative type operations extremely fast, but simple things like addition/subtraction quite slow.
you are only benchmarking multiplicative or similar routines, giving ARPREC a huge lead, when in practice it might end up being slowest, as addition/subtraction are extremely more common than multiplication. Also, how are you choosing the numbers to test with? it is possible that some packages are using 'sparse' representations or other specialized forms if all your numbers happen to be powers of two or something. also, pretty much all uses of integers will be for very small integers, we should be careful to not lose sight of speed for the common case due to pretty asymtotic bounds. I mean, it would be great to be proven wrong and find out ARPREC was great across the board. :) John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈ _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users