Newsgroups: comp.lang.apl
Path: watmath!watserv2.uwaterloo.ca!torn!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!psinntp!juliet!news
From: jja@fnbc.com (Joseph Alotta)
Subject: sorry, but a disappointing performance report
Message-ID: <1993Jan5.190233.13373@fnbc.com>
Keywords: performance,j
Sender: news@fnbc.com
Organization: First National Bank Of Chicago, Chicago IL, USA
Date: Tue, 5 Jan 93 19:02:33 GMT
Lines: 49


greetings,

here at my company they have been using a apl-like interpreter
in production mode for about a year.  we'll call it z language to
avoid proprietary issues.

we did a test in both languages:

   a=. i. 1e7
   +/a
4.999995e11

for the above, the z interpreter was an order of magnitude (10x) faster  
than the j interpreter.

the person who wrote it, a very smart person, says he didn't do anything
special or anything different than what a good c programmer would
noramlly do.   my quick inspection of his source code proves this to be  
true.

the z interpreter is an order of magnitude slower than compiled c code, so  
that means that j is 2 orders of magnitude (100x) slower than c.

this raises the following questions:

1.  can these results be verified by testing j against apl interpreters?

2.  can it be that j is doing additional work that z is not?

3.  does anyone really care about the speed?

4.  perhaps maybe someone should think about modifying to j interpreter
to have it run faster.

5.  i might be willing to take a look at it, if i could find the
documentation.  as it is i can't make head or tails out of the code.


joe.


==============================================================
! joe alotta                                    jja@fnbc.com !                                               
!                                             (312) 732-3439 !
!                                                            !
! "The main thing is to keep the main thing the main thing." !
! Dr. George Sweeney                                         !
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