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Friday, May 9, 2014
Floating Point Benchmark: ALGOL 60 Added
I have posted an update to my trigonometry-intense floating point benchmark which adds ALGOL 60 to the list of languages in which the benchmark is implemented. A new release of the benchmark collection including ALGOL 60 is now available for downloading. ALGOL 60 was one of the first languages designed to be machine-independent, a standard produced by an committee unaffiliated with any computer manufacturer. ALGOL 60 was also intended to be a means of formally specifying and publishing algorithms in academic journals. Due to this goal, and because at the time input/output (I/O) was considered highly machine-specific, the language specification included no I/O facilities at all. This meant that in order to use it as a programming language, the ALGOL 60 standard had to be extended to include I/O. Each implementation tended to do this in its own way, meaning that while the core language was portable, actual programs could not be moved from one compiler to another without modification. This, along with what was considered the complexity of some aspects of the language, in particular “call by name” procedure parameters, hindered adoption of the language in industry. Further, vendors had already invested heavily in improving the performance of ALGOL 60's principal competitor, FORTRAN, and consequently FORTRAN compilers usually out-performed ALGOL 60. In computationally intense scientific and engineering work, with the slow and costly computers of the time, this gave FORTRAN the edge. Still, if you look at almost any modern computer language, you'll see the legacy of ALGOL 60. Its generality, machine-independence, support for nested procedures, recursion, and stack-based call structure have become commonplace. Although the term “structured programming” was not invented until years later, ALGOL 60 contained most of the constructs it required. Programming today in ALGOL 60 is an excellent experience in retrocomputing. While the language was extremely (and, to some, frighteningly) advanced for its time, there are some lacunæ which are striking to the contemporary programmer. Most obvious is the lack of a standard I/O system, but also there is no way to initialise variables (a feature FORTRAN had) except by declaring them and then assigning them values at run time. One cannot define named constants: you either use a literal or declare it as a variable and initialise it (and then someone reading the program can't be sure it's never changed without examining the entire program). There is no standard mechanism for separate compilation: this makes building and maintaining large programs challenging. These facilities were provided by extensions in some implementations of the language, but usually in non-portable ways. The relative performance of the various language implementations (with C taken as 1) is as follows. All language implementations of the benchmark listed below produced identical results to the last (11th) decimal place.| Language | Relative Time |
Details |
|---|---|---|
| C | 1 | GCC 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Visual Basic .NET | 0.866 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| FORTRAN | 1.008 | GNU Fortran (g77) 3.2.3 -O3, Linux |
| Pascal | 1.027 1.077 |
Free Pascal 2.2.0 -O3, Linux GNU Pascal 2.1 (GCC 2.95.2) -O3, Linux |
| Java | 1.121 | Sun JDK 1.5.0_04-b05, Linux |
| Visual Basic 6 | 1.132 | All optimisations, Windows XP |
| Haskell | 1.223 | GHC 7.4.1-O2 -funbox-strict-fields, Linux |
| Ada | 1.401 | GNAT/GCC 3.4.4 -O3, Linux |
| Go | 1.481 | Go version go1.1.1 linux/amd64, Linux |
| ALGOL 60 | 3.951 | MARST 2.7, GCC 4.8.1 -O3, Linux |
| Lisp | 7.41 19.8 |
GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Compiled, Linux GNU Common Lisp 2.6.7, Interpreted |
| Smalltalk | 7.59 | GNU Smalltalk 2.3.5, Linux |
| Forth | 9.92 | Gforth 0.7.0, Linux |
| COBOL | 12.5 46.3 |
Micro Focus Visual COBOL 2010, Windows 7 Fixed decimal instead of computational-2 |
| Algol 68 | 15.2 | Algol 68 Genie 2.4.1 -O3, Linux |
| Python | 17.6 | Python 2.3.3 -OO, Linux |
| Perl | 23.6 | Perl v5.8.0, Linux |
| Ruby | 26.1 | Ruby 1.8.3, Linux |
| JavaScript | 27.6 39.1 46.9 |
Opera 8.0, Linux Internet Explorer 6.0.2900, Windows XP Mozilla Firefox 1.0.6, Linux |
| QBasic | 148.3 | MS-DOS QBasic 1.1, Windows XP Console |
Posted at May 9, 2014 22:45