On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info> wrote:
On Sat, Jan 27, 2018 at 09:12:29AM +1100, Chris Angelico wrote:
Are you sure it's the language's fault? Failing to use a better data type simply because some other language doesn't have it is a great way to make a test that's "fair" in the same way that Balance and Armageddon are "fair" in Magic: The Gathering. They reset everyone to the baseline, and the baseline's equal for everyone right?
I'm afraid I have no idea what that analogy means :-)
When you push everyone to an identical low level, you're not truly being fair. Let's say you try to benchmark a bunch of programming languages against each other by having them use no more than four local variables, all integers, one static global array for shared storage, and no control flow other than conditional GOTOs. (After all, that's all you get in some machine languages!) It's perfectly fair, all languages have to compete on the same grounds. But it's also completely UNfair on high level languages, because you're implementing things in terribly bad ways. "Fair" is a tricky concept, and coding in a non-Pythonic way is not truly "fair" to Python. ChrisA