Richards bench benchmark

[Peter Hansen]

Duncan Lissett wrote:
> Is there a Python implementation of Martin Richards benchmark Bench?
> 
> Be interesting to add it to these
> www.lissett.com/ben/exp/bench1.htm

I doubt one exists yet.  There doesn't even appear to be a 
specification.  It even looks like different implementations of
that benchmark were implemented by random people porting arbitrary
other versions.  For example, the Algol68 one comes from Pascal,
and the Pascal one came from C (?).

Worse than that, I can't find a specification for the benchmark
anywhere.  What's it supposed to do?  Writing this in Python by
reverse engineering a possibly buggy implementation from some other
language would be a wonderful exercise in futility.

There's a hint on http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/Bench.html
(Martin's own page on the subject) which suggests ("designed for the
comparison of System Implementation Languages") that this is not
a suitable benchmark for Python anyway.  Python doesn't normally
get used in that domain, and it might be it can't even do what
is required without resorting to C extensions...

My guess is there are more modern benchmarks that are much more
effective at comparing Python performance in areas where it's really
used, but without even a paper describing this one, who could say?

-Peter