[Shootout-list] what do we test?

[Bengt Kleberg]

greetings,

Isaac Gouy started to look at what our tests do. inspired by this i have 
made an attempt to qualify the tests as to what they try to measure. i 
use a simpleminded prefix nameing system to categorise them somewhat. 
since i did not read all the code, just the ''about this test'' i have 
made many errors. any suggestions to improve this table are encuraged. 
(an alternative would be to improve the tests to better fit the table :-)

there is a special category, real-work, that can have millions of test 
entries since it is not a low level bench mark. imho.
i am unhappy with putting sieve here, since it is rather stricly defined 
how one is allowed to do sieve. but then we have some rather different 
entries anyway, so i thought way not. i am lazy.


it looks like we have a rather fairly distributed amount of tests. most 
low level things gets only one test each. also, the prefix way of 
writing this table suggest that some tests are missing. 
file/network-block-io should be there, but is not.
string-access (ie str(r)char() etc) is also obviously missing.


Real-work:	reverse sieve spell wc wordfreq
array-access:	ary
exception-handling:	except
file-line-io:	sumcol
function-calls:	ackerman fibo
hash-and-number-to-string:	hash
hash:	hash2
list-access: lists
math-floating-point:	moments
math-integer:	random
matrix-multiplication:	matrix
nested-loops:	nestedloop
network-line-io:	echo
object-instantiation:	objinst
object-methodcall:	methcall
process-message-passing:	ring
process-synchronisation:	prodcons
regular-expression-matching:	regexmatch
regular-expression-substitution:	regsub
runtime-code-loading:	plugin
startup:	hello
string-append:	strcat


bengt