>>>>> "Jan" == Jan Skibinski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> One of the myths was that Smalltalk was notoriously slow for
> math. I checked this last time four years ago in a context
> of comparative tests between Smalltalk and Eiffel interpreter
Speed comparison of interpreters is pretty much pointless when trying
to assess the `speed of a language'. Most of what makes `slow' languages
slow becomes lost in the interpretive overhead. I'm pretty sure that
O'Caml's byte code interpreter is much faster than any C interpreter ever
written.
> Obviously, the story would be different for Eiffel compiler,
> where those casts take place at the compile time, but this
> lesson still has some sense in the context of Hugs, hasn't it?
Of course: it's pretty clear that multiprecision integer support can be made
fast rather easily in an interpreter.
Self showed that multiprecision integers can be made reasonably fast even in
the case of compiled code, but they heavily relied on run-time (re)compilation
which is not always possible/easy/desirable/...
Stefan
