On Thu, Aug 7, 2008 at 8:12 AM, alex23 <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Aug 7, 8:08 pm, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> Really how silly can it be when you suggest someone is taking a >> position and tweaking the benchmarks to prove a point [...] > > I certainly didn't intend to suggest that you had tweaked -anything- > to prove your point. > > I do, however, think there is little value in slavishly implementing > the same algorithm in different languages. To constrain a dynamic > language by what can be achieved in a static language seemed like such > an -amazingly- artificial constraint to me. That you're a fan of > Python makes such a decision even more confusing. > > It's great that you saw value in Python enough to choose it for actual > project work. It's a shame you didn't endeavour to understand it well > enough before including it in your benchmark. > > As for it being "disappointing", the real question is: has it been > disappointing for you in actual real-world code? > > Honestly, performance benchmarks seem to be the dick size comparison > of programming languages. > -
I actually think that modelling this problem the way he chose to, with a Person class and by manually popping stuff out of a linked list instead of more simply representing the alive/dead state of the soldiers is a poor solution in general. Whenever you talk about performance, you need to have a context to evaluate it in and you need an idea of what you're trying to measure and why it's important for your purposes. A solution which models the soldiers as bits in a bitfield is going to run much, much, much faster in C/C++/D than the current OO/linked list one (not to mention in much less space), and the JIT in Java/C# and probably python with psyco can improve that as well. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
