--- Sebastian Sylvan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Some of the problems seem to be heavily geared > towards an imperative *implementation*, meaning that a Haskell > version is hardly idiomatic Haskell (and as such I , and I > suspect otehrs, really have no inclination to work on it).
I agree that several benchmarks suffer from this problem, but we have been trying to change this where possible. > Take the fannuch benchmark for instance. Part of it > is to generate input data (all permutations of a sequence). It > would be better to not require the program to print out the > first 30 lists from the input data, since that places > additional (completely unneeded) restrictions > on how to implement the program (and leads to an > unnecessarily ugly implementation if you generate the input in > a non-imperative fashion). I must disagree. We based this benchmark on a very standard benchmark studied by Lisp implementors (and others, see e.g., http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/315141.html)in an effort to address the problems of the original array access benchmark (which was extremely imperative in nature). I don't think asking Haskell to handle this simple program is unfair; Ken Anderson and others dealt with this for Lisp many years ago. > I assume it's no coincidence that this sequence > exactly matches the "straightforward" way to generate > permutations in C. But I think Haskell may face real-world cases where data must be produced in some known order. For Haskell to be a contender in "real world" use, it sometimes has to confront ugly requirements. > I should also note that I don't think these benchmarks mean > anything at all. It would be better to test, say, the best > possible solutions for some of the ICFP programming contests, > for example. They say a lot more about real-world speed. Agreed. However, it's a lot easier to get volunteers to implement small benchmarks (therefore, providing the ability to compare many languages) rather than large ICFP entries. -Brent _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [email protected] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
