[fpc-pascal] Happy tickets benchmark

[Mark Morgan Lloyd]

Serguei TARASSOV wrote:

>>>> >>Well, as said before: if the speed of code like this is important 
>>>> for you,
>>>> >>use C.
>>> >It's a wrong choice.
>>> >As we can see and reproduce, at least C# or other Pascal-like 
>>> environments
>>> >(Oxygene) are significantly faster.
>>> >http://www.arbinada.com/main/en/node/1532
>>> >
>> What Florian means is that this is very artificial code, and that - 
>> although
>> he has been able to apply the necessary patches to make FPC faster - the
>> necessary optimizations are not likely to help in real-life programs.
>>
>> Michael.
> 
> Sounds like the real-life programs don't use inner loops or don't solve 
> NP-complete problems  :)
> For info, my real-life examples are the application server and the DSL 
> script engine.
> So any improvement of quality of FPC's generated code are welcome.

Anybody using a high-level language for real work would be advised to 
understand the problem a bit better so that they didn't have to use your 
sort of brute-force approach. And at that point, having something that 
expresses higher-level algorithms and coding practices (threads, dynamic 
arrays) becomes at least as important as brute force efficiency.

In the past I've come across people trying to solve recreational 
problems asking (stupid) questions like "would Python be faster than 
FORTRAN", and then having somebody respond that their approach is so 
naive that language choice makes no real difference.

So in the case of your chosen problem: you know whether the left-hand 
sum is even or odd, so a trivial optimisation would be only looking at 
half of the possible values of the final (right-hand) digit. At which 
point, pointing out that FPC doesn't have a STEP or BY clause in the FOR 
statement would be far more useful criticism.

-- 
Mark Morgan Lloyd
markMLl .AT. telemetry.co .DOT. uk

[Opinions above are the author's, not those of his employers or colleagues]