Accelerating APL programs with SAC

The paper investigates, how S<sc>AC</sc>, a purely functional language based on C syntax, relates to A<sc>PL</sc> in terms of expressiveness and run-time behavior. To do so, three different excerpts of real world A<sc>PL</sc> programs are examined. It is shown that after defining the required A<sc>PL</sc> primitives in S<sc>AC</sc>, the example programs can be re-written in S<sc>AC</sc> with an almost one-to-one correspondence. Run-time comparisons between interpreting A<sc>PL</sc> programs and compiled S<sc>AC</sc> programs show that speedups due to compilation vary between 2 and 500 for three representative benchmark programs.

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