Fwd: Re: [Shootout-list] Ray tracer developments

[skaller]

On Sat, 2005-04-30 at 08:48, Brent Fulgham wrote:

> That's an interesting idea.  It penalizes languages
> that are verbose, or overly low-level in terms of
> how much "stuff" you can implement within the
> allowed line-limit.

Which is why I once argued the default CRAPS setting should
be set to something like

2:1:1

speed:memory:loc

My favourite setting is actually

0:0:1

which makes Haskell the easy winner, despite its
poor speed on some tests.
 
> You don't have to be Jon Bently to recognize that
> better compilers may give you multiples of
> performance, but that better algorithms give you
> orders of magnitude of improvement.
>  
> I kind of like this idea -- what do the rest of you
> think?
>  
> I also think that I will get even more whiney
> hate-mail than usual if we implement this change,
> but I find the mail more amusing than hurtful, so
> I'm game for it!  :-)

LOC is of course a poor measure of complexity.
So a hard LOC limit is hard to justify.

OTOH just adjusting the default CRAPS setting
automatically penalises verbose languages,
at the same time allowing the Shootout developers
to disallow ridiculously long solutions in
an arbitrary way most people wouldn't argue about.

Hehe .. I don't look forward to the immediate result, 
which will push Felix down the scale quite a bit,
but it would be a welcome challange.. if the Shootout
is a good measure of what *I* think an ideal language
would be like I'd be using it to actually guide
the development of Felix (and in fact this is currently
the case, though I weary of arguments, even with myself,
whether a particular implementation really conforms
to 'same way' requirements).

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net