How much time to count from 1 to 1e7?

[Denis Pelletier]

Hello,

I started playing with Octave in the last few weeks. I'm presently running
Octave 2.1.34 on an AMD K7 1.2 GHz. I do most of my work with Gauss.

I'm trying to have a feel of how fast Octave is. I made simple programs in
Octave and Gauss to compare both. In many cases, Octave is faster (e.g.
computing the inverse of a matrix). But the "while" command of Octave
seems pretty slow compare to the one in Gauss. With Octave the following
program takes 146 seconds:
i=1;
tic;
while (i <= 1e7)
  ++i;
endwhile
toc

The equivalent program in Gauss takes 12 seconds.

Am I doing something wrong? Is there a way to speed up Octave? An
optimization flag when compiling Octave?

Since my typical program use the "while" command (maximizing a
log-likelihod with the BFGS algorithm) it run a lot slower in Octave.

For numerous reasons I want to ditch Gauss. I would be very happy if I
could replace it with Octave.

Thanks.

Denis
_______________________________________________
Denis Pelletier
Étudiant au doctorat
sciences économiques, Université de Montréal




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