----- Original Message -----
> From: "o...@cs.otago.ac.nz" <o...@cs.otago.ac.nz>
> Sent: Friday, May 18, 2012 9:38 AM
> Subject: Re: [Haskell-cafe] Can Haskell outperform C++?
-snip-
>> and if we want
>> to compare *languages*, we should use identical algorithms to make the
>> comparison fair.
>
> In the permutation generation example, I was talking about
> four programs:
> Language X Language Y
> Method 1 Program X1 Program Y1 -- identical algorithms
> Method 2 Program X2 Program Y2 -- identical algorithms
>
> However, "identical" isn't clearly defined.
Moreover, being absolutely sure that the algorithms are in some sense
"identical" might make comparison pointless - for example, when the same
assembly
is generated by gcc from a C program and gnat from an Ada program.
-snip-
> In the 'tsort' case, it turns out that the Java and Smalltalk
> versions are I/O bound with over 90% of the time spent just
> reading the data.
My guess is that they could be written to do better than that - but it's
idiotic of me to say so without understanding the specifics, please
forgive me ;-)
> They have I/O libraries with very different
> structures, so what does "identical algorithms" mean? If you
> are using dictionaries/hashmaps, and the two languages have
> implementations that compute different hash functions for strings,
> is _that_ using the same implementation?
Of course, to some degree, user defined hash functions remedy that specific
problem.
I agree with the thrust of your comments - even programming languages (and
implementations) that seem similar, are often so different (when we get down to
specifics) that comparison between programs written in different languages is a
matter of making the best of a bad job.
But we're still going to ask - Will my program be faster if I write it in
language X? - and we're
still going to wish for a simpler answer than - It depends how you write it!
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