[REBOL] Re: language shoot-out :-)
From: joel:neely:fedex at: 5-Nov-2002 10:13
Hi, Jan,
Not complaining, exactly, just explaining why I hadn't already done
the benchmarking myself... ;-)
Jan Skibinski wrote:
> Well, the Ackerman function is a sick function, specificly
> designed to defeat the tail recursion elimination..
>
Please allow me to disagree slightly; the point here is just to see
how the different languages being stress tested handle deep recursion.
This is an exercise in language comparison, not in programmer work-
arounds, so modifying one or more of the tests to circumvent some
language-imposed limitation really *is* "cheating", as you put it.
To quote from the web page for the Ackermann test:
About this test
For this test, each program should be implemented in the same
way. (For this test, all solutions must use recursion as
specified below. For a number of languages other (iterative)
techniques may be much faster, but that would make it a
different test.)
Each program should implement the recursive version of
Ackermann's function illustrated below.
Ackermann's function is heavily recursive, and will really
stress a language's ability to do deep recursion.
Ergo the need to implement the function literally, and the concern
over the fact that there are fairly severe limitations to the depth
of REBOL's recursion.
FWIW, I've run into other programming situations doing "real work"
where I had to stop and redesign an algorithm because it ran into
this limit.
-jn-
--
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Joel Neely joelDOTneelyATfedexDOTcom 901-263-4446
