Christoph Zwerschke wrote: > > See the following web page if you dont find it ;-) > http://googleresearch.blogspot.com/2006/06/extra-extra-read-all-about-it-nearly.html >
The point of that is that it did fail. It threw an ArrayIndexOutOfBoundsException exception. But it was just luck that happened. Unfortunately I don't think java and C# have integer overflow checking turned on by default. Take this longArithmetic benchmark here: http://www.cowell-shah.com/research/benchmark/code and a story about it here: http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=5602&page=3 The java and C# versions are fast (15 seconds for me), BUT, they give the incorrect result because of an overflow error. The python version gives the correct result because it transparently changes the underlying types to handle the larger numbers, BUT this causes it to run over 20X slower than Java or C#. It takes 10 minutes to complete in python, not 15 seconds. With psyco, it takes 5 minutes. So to say the story you pointed out shows that python is superior is a matter of perspective. Yes, python gave the correct result by silently changing the underlying types to longs, and that is what I would expect of a scripting language. But the price is speed. In both these cases, I would rather be made aware of the error in the code and fix it so I didn't have to suffer slowdowns. That is why in boo ( http://boo.codehaus.org/ ) luckily overflow checking is enabled by default, and it throws a overflow exception at runtime to tell you something is wrong with your code. When you then fix for that, you get the same 15 second time just like java and C#. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
