🚀 go-pugleaf

I have run some of the benchmarks published by The Computer Center on
APL*PLUS/PC w/o 8087 and compared them to their results.  In general
they are comparable, however I now believe they used version 2.6 of
APL*PLUS/PC while I used version 3.0, which did speed up things,
especially in matrix divide.

My guess is that different timers will get different results, and may
also cause some variance in the benchmark.

My timer looped N times (N is typically 100), performed a 'quad'WA (which
forces a gargabe collection), does a timestamp, executes the expression,
does another timestamp, calculates the differences, and loops back.
The answer reported was the average time.

One of the points of the benchmark was to show the significance of the 8087
chip.  Creative Computing has been publishing some benchmarks on accuracy
of floating point operations, and computers that used the 8087 (such as the
IBM PC and Grid) scored the best in terms of accuracy.  While the test was
terrible (it only tested square roots and squaring), it does hint at the power
of the 8087.  Too bad that the 68000 doesn't support the 8087 (except in the
IBM XT/370, where they used modified 68000 & 8087 chips).  Together, they
could make a powerful combination.

Marc S. Meketon
hou2f!vifl