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From: watapl@water.UUCP (APL Quote Quad)
Newsgroups: net.lang.apl
Subject: Re: Sample code
Message-ID: <417@water.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 12-Jun-86 08:29:46 EDT
Article-I.D.: water.417
Posted: Thu Jun 12 08:29:46 1986
Date-Received: Sun, 15-Jun-86 03:38:20 EDT
References: <706@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <5621@alice.uUCp>
Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario
Lines: 34

> As absurd as it may sound, I know a guy who claims that the
> real-world performance of an APL system can be accurately
> predicted by finding out how fast an empty user-defined
> function can be called in a simple loop.  Thus:
> 
> 
> 	N <- 1000
> LOOP:	FUN
> 	-> (0 >= N <- N - 1) / LOOP
> 
> 
> where FUN has no arguments and no body.

It would be interesting to have reports of people's experience here.
For instance, the Harris Benchmark today makes allowance for an "ADJ"
term which measures more or less the time taken for the above loop.  It
would be interesting, to see a system that is blindingly fast on that
expression, but stupidly slow at some "real" problem.  But, I doubt
that such a system exists.

At the other extreme however, a good example does exist, notably "The
APL Machine"  by Analogic.  It is not expecally fast on the empty loop,
but as a parallel processor ( Is APL the first language parallel
processing language? ) it is like greased lightning.  Ask it to invert
a 200 by 200 matrix or multiply two long real vectors with say 250K
entries each.  Instantaneous!

I think it gives incredible performance for modest price.  I wish I had
one!

-- 
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