Dear CAML mailing list,

Recently, I have converted by hand, a 3500 line OCAML program simulating 
an optical disk system by hand into a C++ program. This is mainly a 
floating point program. As the maximum line width varied somewhat in the 
C++ program and between the OCAML and the C++ program, line count is not 
such a good comparison for program size. Instead I used character count 
after replacing all sequences of N spaces by a single space (I did not use 
tabs). Then, it turned out that the C++ program was 23% longer. Note that 
the variable names, comments, were mostly the same. When I took the 
original files and compared zipped file size, the C++ program was 16% 
larger. 
        With the C++ program I did not count a brief generic random 
generator header file and a longer generic multi-dimensional array with 
bound checking using assert statements header file as I could have taken 
just standard C++ arrays on the stack. The C++ program (without 
optimization and a lot of "as local as possible" variable declaration, 
similar to OCAML) was around 10% faster than the OCAML program on an AMD64 
platform, when using g++ to compile the C++ program.

Regards,

Andries 

------------------------------------------------------------------------
Dr. Ir. Andries P. Hekstra
Philips Research (soon : Philips Semiconductor Research)
High Tech Campus 27  (WL-1-4.15)
5656 AG Eindhoven
Tel./Fax/Secr. +31 40 27 42048/42566/44051 

* "Bad software has about 100 hidden bugs ; good software only 10." (C 
programming Tutor)