[lrem]

Among others: because of completely arbitrary and I'd dare to say weird rules. Programs are not meant to be written in idiomatic language. They are meant to resemble the C implementation. In many cases you can see that the program representing the language in the comparison is neither the fastest nor the simplest of the submissions.

[igouy]

You've made a bunch of claims without showing any evidence to support them. Please point to specific examples we can all look at on the website which show -- "Programs are not meant to be..." -- which show -- "They are meant to resemble the C implementation." etc

[lrem]

I'm not going to back up these claims in any other way than pointing the "interesting alternative" programs that appear in some comparisons, which tend to be faster than the chosen versions. For example here: http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u64q/benchmark.php?test=fa... Both Lisp and Java alternatives are faster than the "fastest" solution (written in Fortran). Finding any more support for the years-old opinion I voiced seems too much work to be worth it.

[igouy]

So we can immediately dismiss your "Programs are not meant to be written in idiomatic language. They are meant to resemble the C implementation." claims as baseless.

The only example you chose shows programs that manually unroll loops are not accepted. (And that's stated explicitly on the Help page. http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/help.php#unroll)

[lrem]

Yes, you can. Just one last mention: my opinion was formed in the times I used Perl and looked around the actual implementations of these. But that was years ago. It was reinforced quite recently by someone whining (probably on HN) about the same things. Apart from these anecdotes, I have no basis for these words.

[igouy]

> But that was years ago.

It's a sad nuisance when people opine without checking what's actually shown on a public website.

It's sad to see fact based comments being down voted on HN.

[lrem]

> It's a sad nuisance when people opine without checking what's actually shown on a public website.

Well, I could simply ignore the question. Or give the answer I got a few years ago, what I did...

> It's sad to see fact based comments being down voted on HN.

Fact based? More like facts querying. Which is the reason I upvoted every single of your comments...

[chromatic]

"... we ask that contributed programs not only give the correct result, but also use the same algorithm to calculate that result."

(Except for meteor-contest.)

[igouy]

I'm sure you wish to make a point -- please don't make everyone guess what you mean, just spell it out.

[chromatic]

An algorithm that's idiomatic in one language might be terribly unidiomatic in another. (I'm sure you know this, but) Haskell's pervasive laziness makes some algorithms tractable while requiring a lot of space/time complexity for other algorithms.