From: Peter Hickman <peter@...>
Date: 2006-08-03T21:59:40+09:00
Subject: Re: For performance, write it in OCaml

Jon Harrop wrote:
> Peter Hickman wrote:
>   
>> I will take the revised Ocaml version and time it and check the output
>> tonight.
>>     
>
> Yeah. I didn't bother doing that. ;-)
>
>   
Not wanting to name and shame but there was one submission (off list) 
that was faster for completely the wrong reasons. Besides I get a warm 
fuzzy feeling when the results match because the pain of checking which 
program is actually wrong is too great. As my Perl, Java and C versions 
all use the same Perl to pre compute their values they all produced the 
same results, consistent yes but are they correct? I'm pretty confident 
now, especially now that I have independently written programs produce 
the same results.

The next stage, which is to stop it reporting rotational and flipped 
versions of a grid, is going to be quite a grind to test.

Any views on Practical Ocaml by Joshua B. Smith, does it look like it 
might be a good book to learn from?