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Subject: Re: String concatentation operator
To: Mark Biggar <mark.a.biggar@attbi.com>
Cc: perl6-language@perl.org
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Date: 21 Nov 2002 15:22:57 +1300
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From: martin@sig.net.nz (Martin D Kealey)

On Thu, 2002-11-21 at 06:57, Mark Biggar wrote:
> Martin D Kealey wrote:
> > I want Perl to run 128 times faster on a 128 CPU machine... now I know
> > that's not entirely realistic, but it should be able to run at least say
> > 60 times faster.
> 
> Amdahl's law applies here:  "no amount of paralellism will speed up
> an inheirently sequential algorithm"

True in the abstract, but in practice in most languages an awful lot of
algorithms that I<aren't> inherently sequential get serialized by the
compiler because it can't tell it's safe to do otherwise.

This is where pure-functional or applicative languages can have a big
performance win - because the compile almost alway I<can> see that
things are safe to parallelize.

-Martin
