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 internet: debray@arizona.edu uucp: arizona!debray