Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> writes:

> Just for the record, I'd like to dispell a couple of myths:
> 
> On Wednesday 16 March 2005 01:05, Yoann Padioleau wrote:
> > IMHO the reason it was slow is because it used associative list (instead of
> > Map) for associative access,
> 
> Although Map is asymptotically faster than List.assoc for lookup (O(ln n) vs 
> O(n)), OCaml's Hashtbl and array-based equivalents are typically several 
> times faster than Map.

I agree, I beleived that too but 
I switched from Map to Hashtbl in the "troll" code and Hashtbl sux. 
I don't know why.

> Also, I think that many people would consider the use of an imperative data 
> structure, such as a hash table, for memoizing to be the remit of functional 
> programming.

I do. As much as possible I try to have "persistent" (persistent in the okasaki sense)
data-structures.


> 
> On Wednesday 16 March 2005 00:18, Oliver Bandel wrote:
> > which does not really looks tail recursive.
> > Called more than 2 * 10^6 times...
> > And many other examples...
> 
> In OCaml, non-tail-recursive functions are often faster than their tail 
> recursive equivalents for small inputs (e.g. short lists). 

really ? why ?

> I expect that the 
> functions you have identified fall into this category, so converting them to 
> tail-recursive form is likely to slow the program down rather than speed it 
> up.

-- 
Yoann  Padioleau,  INSA de Rennes, France   www.irisa.fr/prive/padiolea/
Opinions expressed here are only mine. Je n'écris qu'à titre personnel.
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