Richards bench benchmark

[Peter Hansen]

Duncan Lissett wrote:

> Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message news:<jLCdnW28-PB6cfXdRVn-iQ at powergate.ca>...
> 
> 
>>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...
> 
> 
> That would be sad, given that language implementors have used Bench to
> explore the performance characteristics of Smalltalk and Self and
> Java.
> 
> "Benchmarking Java with the Richards benchmark"
> http://research.sun.com/people/mario/java_benchmarking/richards/richards.html

That has useful additional info I couldn't find on Richards' own site.
(His own site refers to it as "bench", but I guess others call it
"richard" -- it helps to be searching for the right thing.)

It appears the "specification" is his original, which was written
in BCPL.  It also seems that the problem is relatively generic,
just a "task scheduler", without really requiring low-level support
of the kind I feared (after looking at the Pascal and C versions).

I'd implement it in Python for kicks, but I'm not sure how I'd know
whether my version was doing the right thing.  Are there any tests
for it?  Ways of ensuring the output is correct?

-Peter