Re: Offtopic: How to Design Programming Tests

[Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu>]

Michael Vanier wrote:

>		      Is the mzscheme collector a copying collector?

Not the extant one, no.  I believe Matthew is developing one that is.

> Realistically, though, I suspect that performance in scheme has very little
> to do with lists vs. arrays and much more to do with the overhead of
> dynamic typing (and bytecode interpretation for implementations like
> mzscheme).  Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong :-)  

It's hard to either correct you or agree with you.  Performance of
functional and other languages is such a complex topic, almost any
generalization can be proven invalid under some circumstances.
Broadly speaking, though, you are probably right.  In terms of
importance, of the three you list, bytecode implementation is probably
the dominant factor, followed by run-time checks.  Cache behavior is
anyway a secondary/tertiary effect.

>							Since I'm interested
> in mzscheme as a replacement for python, not C, this doesn't concern me
> either.

Yes, you shouldn't be concerned.

Shriram