ark@alice.UucP (Andrew Koenig) (06/11/86)
As absurd as it may sound, I know a guy who claims that the real-world performance of an APL system can be accurately predicted by finding out how fast an empty user-defined function can be called in a simple loop. Thus: N <- 1000 LOOP: FUN -> (0 >= N <- N - 1) / LOOP where FUN has no arguments and no body.
watapl@water.UUCP (APL Quote Quad) (06/12/86)
> As absurd as it may sound, I know a guy who claims that the > real-world performance of an APL system can be accurately > predicted by finding out how fast an empty user-defined > function can be called in a simple loop. Thus: > > > N <- 1000 > LOOP: FUN > -> (0 >= N <- N - 1) / LOOP > > > where FUN has no arguments and no body. It would be interesting to have reports of people's experience here. For instance, the Harris Benchmark today makes allowance for an "ADJ" term which measures more or less the time taken for the above loop. It would be interesting, to see a system that is blindingly fast on that expression, but stupidly slow at some "real" problem. But, I doubt that such a system exists. At the other extreme however, a good example does exist, notably "The APL Machine" by Analogic. It is not expecally fast on the empty loop, but as a parallel processor ( Is APL the first language parallel processing language? ) it is like greased lightning. Ask it to invert a 200 by 200 matrix or multiply two long real vectors with say 250K entries each. Instantaneous! I think it gives incredible performance for modest price. I wish I had one! -- watapl@watmath.UUCP watapl%watmath@waterloo.CSNET ... {ihnp4, allegra, decvax} !watmath!watapl
ljdickey@water.UUCP (Lee Dickey) (06/12/86)
> At the other extreme however, a good example does exist, notably "The > APL Machine" by Analogic. ... > ... > I wish I had one! I wish I had three.