Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!ists!yunexus!oz From: oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) Newsgroups: comp.lang.scheme Subject: Re: Scheme Benchmarking [topics from hell, part 3] Message-ID: <22642@yunexus.YorkU.CA> Date: 4 May 91 17:57:19 GMT References: <1991May2.155838.20830@bronze.ucs.indiana.edu> <22632@yunexus.YorkU.CA> <1991May3.094225.11007@news.cs.indiana.edu> Sender: news@yunexus.YorkU.CA Distribution: comp.lang.scheme Organization: York U. Communications Research & Development Lines: 33 hieb@heston.cs.indiana.edu (Robert Hieb) writes: >Please do not just transliterate C or Lisp code into Scheme. >Unfortunately, it is easy to do so, since Scheme has assignments, >loops, etc. I cannot think of any reason to want to transliterate C into scheme for benchmarking purposes, though there is much lisp code that admittedly look attractive for this purpose. >Instead a translation is needed, using the idioms of Scheme. I think I know what you mean. Last year I spent two days annotating the entire ops5 source listing (yes, on paper!) for scheme conversion, and the result turned out to be mostly descriptive of a re-write (using scheme idioms) than pseudo-mechanical transliteration. I suspect that most schemers would not feel good about any code resulting from simple transliterations. As OK says[1], Elegance is NOT optional. >It would be nice to have Scheme benchmarks that used closures and >continuations in a natural way. True. I expect that any agreed-upon set of benchmarks would have to be properly representative of the language, in its current standard and practice, with its idioms and all. oz --- [1] O'Keefe, Richard A. "The Craft of Prolog", MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1990 --- A pencil is so far the most effective software | internet: oz@nexus.yorku.ca design tool I have found... -- Amanda Walker | uucp: utai/utzoo!yunexus!oz