[Shootout-list] Directions of various benchmarks

[skaller]

On Wed, 2005-05-18 at 06:11, Einar Karttunen wrote:
> skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net> writes:
> > Why not? If you language is hard to read and you
> > need more comments to explain it, it deserves
> > to be penalised. IMHO. EG some special hack in C
> > which saves time and LOC, but which requires
> > in-depth understanding of the C Standard's rules
> > about sequence points DESERVES to be penalised:
> > good programmers should write that kind of C.
> 
> In the short tests typically comments are 50% of lines.
> They mainly make notes about who contributed, tuned etc 
> the benchmark. Sometimes they also make additional
> notes about the implementation.
> 
> Most of the time these comments are nice and it would
> be a pity to penalize languages for them. 

Why? Clutter is clutter, valuable comments are valuable,
either way: Comments cost. 

See the Felix standard library which is littered 
with 'doc strings' because they're needed by 
the documentation processor to generate the 
reference manual for the library -- I find it a pain
to maintain because of all these comments (but it
is cheaper than hand writing the library reference
manual and keeping it in synch with the library).

I actually agree with your point that some commentary
provinding meta-information (author), or explaining
the algorithm used, some technical artefact, or
whatever, can be useful.

But I suggest instead of allowing this stuff free --
because it is NOT free -- finding some fair
way to account for it.

For example: "Up to 10 lines of initial comments
are not counted in the LOC score". An arbitrary rule,
I made up on the fly .. any better idea?

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
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