| | Definition: | | \Whet"stone`\, n. [AS. hwetst[=a]n.]
A piece of stone, natural or artificial, used for whetting,
or sharpening, edge tools.
The dullness of the fools is the whetstone of the wits.
--Shak.
Diligence is to the understanding as the whetstone to
the razor. --South.
Note: Some whetstones are used dry, others are moistened with
water, or lubricated with oil.
{To give the whetstone}, to give a premium for extravagance
in falsehood. [Obs.]
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| | Definition: | | The first major synthetic benchmark program, intended to be representative for numerical (floating-point intensive) programming. It is based on statistics gathered by Brian Wichmann at the national physical laboratory in England, using an algol 60 compiler which translated Algol into instructions for the imaginary Whetstone machine. The compilation system was named after the small town of Whetstone outside the City of Leicester, England, where it was designed. The later dhrystone benchmark was a pun on Whetstone. Source code: c, single precision fortran, double precision fortran. ["A Synthetic Benchmark", H.J. Curnow and B.A. Wichmann, The Computer Journal, 19,1 (1976), pp. 43-49]. |
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