Richards bench benchmark

[Duncan Lissett]

Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> wrote in message news:<Etqdnd8EeYGjM_TdRVn-jA at powergate.ca>...

> It appears the "specification" is his original, which was written
> in BCPL.  It also seems that the problem is relatively generic,
> just a "task scheduler", without really requiring low-level support
> of the kind I feared (after looking at the Pascal and C versions).

Exactly, it's a simulation of a OS kernel task scheduler.

> I'd implement it in Python for kicks, but I'm not sure how I'd know
> whether my version was doing the right thing.  Are there any tests
> for it?  Ways of ensuring the output is correct?

Martin Richards original spec and debug/trace information is reposted
here:
http://www.lissett.com/ben/com/benchspec.htm

There are many different ways to implement the benchmark, a Python
version of the straightforward OO implementation would be an
interesting place to start. Like these Java C# Smalltalk
implementations:

http://www.lissett.com/ben/exp/bench1-java-62.htm
http://www.lissett.com/ben/exp/bench1-csharp-30.htm
http://www.lissett.com/ben/exp/bench1-smalltalk-34.htm