Coding style article with interesting section on white space

[beliavsky at aol.com]

Alex Martelli wrote:

<snip>

> > For scientific computation, consider the case of Numeric
> > and Numarray. I don't think Numeric binaries are available for
Python
> > 2.4,
>
> <http://www4.ncsu.edu/~jdbrandm/Numeric-23.6.win32-py2.4.exe> ?  Just
> googled and visited the first hit -- I don't currently use Windows so
I
> don't know if it's still there, works well, etc.

I should have Googled. I will investigate that link. At SourceForge,
http://sourceforge.net/project/showfiles.php?group_id=1369 I see a
Numarray but not a Numeric Windows binary for Python 2.4. The latest
Numeric Windows binary there is for Python 2.3.

>
> > The recent "Pystone Benchmark" message says that Python is only 75%
as
> > fast on Linux as on Windows. Fortran programs do not suffer this
> > performance hit and are in this respect more portable. In theory,
as
>
> You're saying that using a different and better compiler cannot speed
> the execution of your Fortran program by 25% when you move it from
one
> platform to another...?!  This seems totally absurd to me, and yet I
see
> no other way to interpret this assertion about "Fortran programs not
> suffering" -- you're looking at it as a performance _hit_ but of
course
> it might just as well be construed as a performance _boost_ depending
on
> the direction you're moving your programs.

I had in mind the Polyhedron Fortran 90 benchmarks for Windows and
Linux on Intel x86 at
http://www.polyhedron.co.uk/compare/linux/f90bench_p4.html and
http://www.polyhedron.co.uk/compare/win32/f90bench_p4.html . The speed
differences of Absoft, Intel, and Lahey between Linux and Windows for
individual programs, not to mention the average differential across all
programs, is much less than 25%. The differences on a single OS between
compilers can be much larger, but that has less bearing on portability
across OS's.

Thanks for your earlier informative comments on languages. Sparring
with Alex Martelli is like boxing Mike Tyson, except that one
experiences brain enhancement rather than brain damage :).