Python is far from a top performer according to benchmarktest...

[Michael Hudson]

Robin Becker <robin at jessikat.fsnet.co.uk> writes:

> this was also my understanding, the difficulty is that humans can't do
> the correct analysis in their heads for all, but the most simple
> programs. I seem to remember that almost all the compilers I used had
> mechanisms for turning off the most aggressive optimisations so if the
> card deck suddenly started working with them off then you could try and
> figure out what was wrong. Another nastiness was that by putting prints
> in you often disrupted the optimisations and the values you got printed
> seemed to indicate everything was fine.

This last point is true in C, too, particularly with floating point
code on x86: turn optimization off or put in debugging prints and then
the floats get rounded to C doubles (64 bytes) frequently; don't, and
they stay as 80 bit values in the FPU for longer.  This can lead to
differing behaviour (and thus programmer insanity).

Cheers,
mwh

-- 
41. Some programming languages manage to absorb change, but
    withstand progress.
  -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html