A Comparison Study on Execution Performance of MATLAB and APL

We present a study on the execution performance of APL and MATLAB on a suite of five programs ranging from one of highly iterative nature to ones mainly do array operations. The comparison on performance is carried out in three different modes of execution: interpreted, compiled and parallel. We found that MATLAB interpreter is in general much faster than APL; and compiled MATLAB code executes not necessary faster while in APL the compiler provides significant performance improvement. The strategies for parallel execution in MATLAB and APL are different: one is interpreter-based, the other compiler-based. We discuss some insights into programming language implementation from this study.