Lambda going out of fashion

[Skip Montanaro]

    Jp> PyStones may be short (and be nearly lambda free!) but it is one
    Jp> opaque blob to me.  I'd be hard pressed to rewrite it in any style,
    Jp> given its perverse use of global state.

It's written that way on purpose, of course.  Pystone is almost a direct
translation of a similar program written in C (dhrystone *), which was
itself a translation of a program written in Ada.  The reason for the rather
unusual coding style in those earlier programs was to defeat compiler
optimization techniques and attempt to test a processor's integer
performance.

Skip

(*) http://performance.netlib.org/performance/html/dhrystone.intro.html