[Edu-sig] Re: The Great Computer Language Shootout

[Brent Burley]

> > >http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/
> 2. ocaml is very promising language:
> - usually it's preformance is compared to c/c++
> but it uses much less lines of code

Not to knock ocaml, but this is one of the worst cases of cheating in
these benchmarks.  ocaml has a built-in 'currying' capability where you
can tell it to record the results of a function and it will cache the
result away in a hash table. 
The Ackerman function in particular is supposed to test how well a
language handles recursion.  By saving previous results, the recursion
is avoided and the whole purpose of this test is defeated.  Many of the
ocaml entries use currying.  Currying can be easily added to the Python
versions too, but then what's the point of the benchmark?

	Brent Burley
	(Sorry for goofing the subject line on my previous post.)