[erlang-questions] Erlang arithmetics

[Richard O'Keefe]

On 30/10/2010, at 10:55 PM, Morten Krogh wrote:

> Sorry, I just realized that you are only timing the inner loop, not the random number generation.
> 
> But why bother with the random numbers then? Shouldn't multiplication and addition run with the same speed for all values of numbers of a given type?

No.

For example, according to
http://pdos.csail.mit.edu/6.828/2007/readings/i386/IMUL.htm
"The 80386 uses an early-out multiply algorithm.
 The actual number of clocks depends on the position of the most
 significant bit in the ... multiplier."

Look for "early-out multiply".

Since these numbers were the results of random:uniform(1000)
they should be particularly nice cases for an early-out multiplier.
Had they been random:uniform(1000000) the products would have
been bignums on a 32-bit machine and thus *much* slower;
bignum operations *definitely* depend on the size of the number.

Nor can you expect the cost of + and * to be uniform for
floats.  Operations that overflow to +/-infinity may well be
*very* expensive on some machines.  One popular implementation
strategy for IEEE arithmetic was to do the easy cases in hardware
and let the operating system finish the tough jobs.