Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!ucbvax!agate!ig!arizona!debray
From: debray@arizona.edu (Saumya Debray)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.prolog
Subject: "A Note on the Speed of Prolog"
Keywords: prolog execution speed
Message-ID: <6251@megaron.arizona.edu>
Date: 14 Jul 88 23:38:03 GMT
Organization: U of Arizona CS Dept, Tucson
Lines: 20


The current (August 88) issue of ACM SIGPLAN Notices has an article
"A Note on the Speed of Prolog", by J. Paakki, that's
interesting.  The author reports on an experiment comparing the
speeds of compilers, written in Pascal and Prolog, for the
language Edison.  What's interesting is that even though the
Prolog implementation used is C-Prolog, the Prolog version of the
compiler is typically only about 5 times slower than the Pascal
version.  Now there are faster Prolog systems readily available
that are anywhere from 10 to 50 times faster than C-Prolog.
Assuming that the comparison is a fair one (i.e. noone's
writing execrable Pascal code or using the slowest Pascal system
available), this seems to suggest that using a "state-of-the-art"
Prolog system, one could actually have a Prolog version of the
compiler that was faster than the Pascal version.
-- 
Saumya Debray		CS Department, University of Arizona, Tucson

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