17 Jul
2007
17 Jul
'07
1:16 p.m.
My equally naive test in PLT DrScheme took less than 15 sec to do 10 million terms of the harmonic series. So 0.15 sec versus your 1 sec. On OS X, intel 1.66 GHz core duo. Also for comparison: to sum 1s instead of floating point numbers, took 9 sec (to give some idea of how much of the time in that calculation might be loop overhead ...) And to calculate triangular numbers (adding n, instead of 1 or 1/n as in the previous trials) took 12 sec (so that gives some idea of the timing of big integer arithmetic vs counting by 1s). So yeah, Maple taking 60 sec is awfully slow. --Joshua Zucker