[Shootout-list] Re: C++ pidigits

[Robert Seeger]

My typical usage of C is to wrap and call it from Tcl. I doubt gmp is
even installed on most of the machines I use, to be honest.

Its fairly common practice for Tcl programmers to call C routines from
Tcl, as well as calling external programs. If its expected to use a
language as it's "typically used", then it would be perfectly
acceptable to call out to external programs when programming in Tcl
(and, I assume, perl).

My opinion is that the tests for the shootout should show what the
language itself can do, and how it does it. By calling out to an
external program or library, you're just adding many hundreds (or
thousands) of lines to your code that aren't being accounted for.

I'm fine with it being ok to call out to external libraries (or even
programs), since that's what Tcl excels at (my primary language
nowadays)... I'd just like a clear answer as to whether its
acceptable. Are external libraries (and/or programs) allowed?

Robert Seeger


On Wed, 16 Mar 2005 00:52:28 +0100, Falk Hueffner <falk@debian.org> wrote:
> Robert Seeger <rhseeger@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> > That was my thought. If we can use external libraries (ie, things
> > that are not part of the core language), then the tests are no
> > longer valid, imo.
> 
> In my opinion the benchmarks are to reflect the typical usage of the
> language. In C++, to solve this problem, you'd typically use something
> like gmp. In Perl, you'd probably typically *not* use Inline::C.
> 
> --
>         Falk
> 
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