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Subject: Re: Can a Programming Language Cause Engines to be Slow?

Author: David Rasmussen

Date: 04:19:56 11/15/02

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On November 14, 2002 at 11:02:37, Vincent Diepeveen wrote:

>On November 13, 2002 at 14:59:56, David Rasmussen wrote:
>
>I actually wrote a checkers program in Gofer (functional language
>developed at university amsterdam).
>
>In fact it was international 10x10 checkers for a 8x8 board. It
>searched about 1 node a second at a P100.
>
>That was not compiled. The gofer2c conversion tool they had was
>very incompatible written for turbo-c, even by then completely outdated.
>
>Yet i tried that once too and it was about a factor 20 faster than runtime.
>
>I translated the code by hand to C and it was a factor 10000 faster.
>
>Of course some gofer experts were not happy when i posted that publicly
>around. They rewrote my code. After some weeks fulltime work they managed
>to speedup my gofer code a factor 2.
>
>Only left a factor 5000 :)
>
>Of course this was without using imperative haskell additions. If you
>are functional, then better write the whole thing functional, if not then
>use an imperative language :)
>
>Language *does* matter.

Sure language matters. That's why I meantion Ada. Ada is as fast as C and C++
but much better for most purposes, including chess programming. If you think Ada
is as slow as interpreted functional languages, you don't know anything about
Ada.

/David



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