Why no Whetstone benchmark for calculators

[rprosperi]

(04-14-2017 08:58 PM)StephenG1CMZ Wrote:  Is it because standard C (etc.) Source cannot be used?

One reason is very few (not enough to matter) calculators use a procedural language like C or PPL, so porting to each machine is fairly involved to claim that this specific port was not 'tuned' to optimize the apparent results for this machine. One reason the Whetstone (and others) is a meaningful comparison is because the code generally does not vary when going from one machine to another as they all support the common languages.

For example, there are many ways of implementing the Whetstone suite in RPL on a 50g and I'd guess that the different solutions vary by as much 200-300% in performance (maybe more), based on the port and particular commands used. So while it may give you a broad placement of the machine's performance in some larger spectrum, I think it would miss the point of comparing one machine to another.