Re: How smart are the XSLT processors? Are there any X

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Subject: Re: How smart are the XSLT processors? Are there any XSLT processors that convert tree-recursive functions into efficient iterative procedures?
From: David Carlisle <davidc@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Thu, 29 Apr 2010 09:38:03 +0100

On 29/04/2010 03:19, Dimitre Novatchev wrote:

FXSL: 33ms

DC:      10.5  seconds.     Also, there is loss of accuracy after the
35th digit.

ah, interesting, I didn't go that far up and saw essentially the same times within experimental error (and exact results). Of course the algorithm I used for power (halving and multiplying: is more or less the same one you used for fib so you'd expect the same number of calculations more or less, but presumably after a while the xs:integer calculations in your version are intrinsically faster then the higher-than-double precision xs:decimal in mine.

the loss of accuracy is of course to be expected, I could have entered phi and root 5 more accurately but I haven't checked recently how many digits of accuracy saxon supports in any case.

The algorithm I used would make more sense (and probably be a lot quicker) if power was a function in the language (and could be directly or closely supported by the hardware arithmetic) but that would be unlikely to be so useful for very high bignum support where a high level optimised library is always(?) going to be needed.

So for the question in the subject line, some compilers may spot some simple non-tail recursive idioms and rewrite but they are unlikely to (but could; as it only uses high school arithmetic) rewrite linear recurrence relations to non-linear but much more efficient relations (as for Dimitre's version) or closed form solutions (as mine). I intened to write mine not as a speed race against fxsl but to show a closed form solution but that point was a bit lost as I had to implement power by a recursive algorithm in any case.

For everyone else, the moral is use fxsl more often:-)

David


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Current Thread

Re: How smart are the XSLT processors? Are there any XSLT processors that convert tree-recursive functions into efficient iterative procedures?, (continued)
- Dimitre Novatchev - 28 Apr 2010 01:40:09 -0000
- Michael Kay - 28 Apr 2010 08:51:12 -0000
- Vladimir Nesterovsky - 28 Apr 2010 09:35:26 -0000
  - Michael Kay - 28 Apr 2010 10:13:46 -0000

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Re: How smart are the XSLT pr, Dimitre Novatchev	Thread	Re: How smart are the XSLT pr, Dimitre Novatchev
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