[Shootout-list] Ray tracer

[John Skaller]

On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 11:41 -0700, Isaac Gouy wrote:

> Once more: If you intended ray-tracer to operate in the way you
> advocate - and not in the manner of the other tests you should have
> made that clear. If you had done so, people would have contributed
> different programs. 

Dues respect and all but this is the most ludicrous thing
I have heard in a long time.

First, the Shootout never had any test specifications.
I guess when Doug Bagley first started out, he knew what
he was comparing.

The new Shootout is not much better: the very first thing one should
see clicking on a benchmark link is the specification,
as I mentioned in another post, you have partly fixed that by
saying 'do the same thing as this java program' in many places,
which is progress (although I think it is in the wrong direction,
that is really another argument).

But to accuse someone else of not making the requirements
clear, and people expected it to be 'the same manner 
as the other tests' when in fact that 'manner' is something
you have introduced yourself, and not at all as a prominent
specification, and certainly not something that has been
stable and in existence for some time ..

Jon Harrop has made it QUITE CLEAR that he favours
functional tests, that this test was chosen precisely
for that reason, that the 100 LOC constraint was EXPECTED
to make it possible for an expressive language like 
Ocaml to outperform a less expressive one, because it
allowed more space for additional coding to improve
the performance .. I knew all of that because I actually
read what he has been posting here.

Maybe the specification wasn't clear because the
web site design is faulty, and there is no 'slot'
in which a test specification can be uploaded?

So maybe instead of talking you could  do something useful
and fix that problem -- perhaps by requiring a file
in a particular directory, with the test name, and
containing the specification (or whatever).

-- 
John Skaller <skaller at users dot sourceforge dot net>
Download Felix: http://felix.sf.net