gregr@tekig1.UUCP (02/28/84)
We all know that benchmarks are misleading and practically useless, often making apples and oranges comparisons, but I simply couldn't resist one Apple and IBM comparison. The Byte Sieve of Eratosthenes benchmark is particular poor but has become sort of a standard so I tried it out on my IBM and a Macintosh. Those of you that are above this sort of thing or plan to just scoff should probably just ctrl-C out of this article at this point. I'll wait for you .................. This is your last chance to keep from getting caught up in this foolishness ....ctrl-C......ctrl-C............ O.K. you were warned (couldn't resist could you!). I've modified the original Byte Basic listing to speed up the performance of the IBM (it should help any version of Microsoft Basic) and seems to be fairer to Basic in comparison with other languages. (Why doesn't he just tell us the results??) So that my test can be duplicated I'll list the changes below. Byte version My version 120 while k <= 8190 120 if k > 8190 then 160 130 flags(k) = 0 130 for j=k to 8190 step prime 140 k = k + prime 140 flags(j) = 0 150 wend 150 next And now the results - IBM Basica 1197 secs Macintosh MS-Basic 749 secs I actually only ran a single iteration and multiplied by ten so that the times can be directly compared with oher results in Bytes survey. Notice how much faster the slight program change allows the IBM to run compared with Bytes results (1990 secs). Seems fair to write the program the fastest way for a given language. One other simple benchmark - I tested the time to do 500 double precision multiplies and divides. IBM Basica 12.7 secs Macintosh MS-Basic 5.0 secs Well, I told you this didn't mean anything so you wasted your own time reading it. But I wonder when the C compiler will be out???