Pitiful benchmark performance

[James Hague]

> I've been browsing the Doug Bagley Shootout pages:
> http://www.bagley.org/~doug/shootout/ and Erlang does 
> spectacularly badly in
> quite a few areas where it shouldn't really be quite that bad.

Some of the benchmarks are pretty convoluted in Erlang.  I'm thinking
specifically of one of the Hash benchmarks, which does a lot of conversion
between lists and atoms inside an inner loop.  To wit: