dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu (Dan Wallach) (05/13/91)
I competed quite a bit in high school, and I Turbo was the only way to go. Since contests are always timed, the fast turnaround of Turbo is a godsend. Most recently, I went to a contest where we were given a choice: Turbo C or Pascal. My group chose C and everybody was happy. It seems to me that if people really wanted Standard Pascal, that could be offered, too. I see no reason to have a contest with ONE language, ESPECIALLY something icky like BASIC. Especially since style doesn't really matter in these contests, there's no reason not to offer both C and Pascal. If judges can read one, they can read the other (sans obfuscated C, of course...). Turbo Pascal's string libraries are similar to ANSI C's standard library functions, in terms of utility, so there's not much of a conflict of "but the Pascal guy already had the whole program written for him!" I don't know how true this is for Object Oriented Turbo Pascal. I'd like to bring up a different topic with regard to contests: should they always be on PC's? The last contest I went to had a lab of PS/2 286 boxes using some horrendous networked disk thing which made saving a modest executable a 2 minute adventure, especially in the final half hour of the contest... For H.S., most people have only been exposed to PC's, and that's about all you can offer them. For college contests, however, workstations would be lots nicer, i.e., having GNU programming tools. How could you prevent security problems from arising, like 'talk'ing to a friend at home and asking questions, or even ftp-ing solutions from elsewhere? Thought for food, Dan Wallach dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu
rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) (05/15/91)
In article <1991May12.213538.1544@agate.berkeley.edu> dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu (Dan Wallach) writes: >I'd like to bring up a different topic with regard to contests: should >they always be on PC's? I don't see any real reason why they should or shouldn't be, except that a bunch of PCs is probably easiest to set up. The first regional contest I went to was on a VAX/VMS system, with a little menu-driven system so if you didn't know VMS commands you weren't at a particular disadvantage (though knowing the editor helped), and so that you could only do editing, compiles, prints, and (electronic) submissions. It seemed to work better than the PC-based contests I've been at, simply because of the electronic submission capabilities, and because compiles and prints both ran at very reasonable speeds. Also, it made restricting the contest to the standard languages (Standard Pascal and FORTRAN 77) trivial. >For college contests, however, workstations would be lots nicer [ ... ] Yes, I think it would be possible to run a contest with some sort of workstation (say, a net of diskless Sun 3/50s). It'd be more work than using PCs, though, and I suspect one can make an argument that using PCs is more "fair" because more colleges have PCs than have any particular kind of workstation.... Anton +---------------------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+ | Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison | "VMS Forever!" | +---------------------------+------------------+-------------+----------------+
raymond@cs.vu.nl (Raymond Michiels) (05/15/91)
rang@cs.wisc.edu (Anton Rang) writes: >In article <1991May12.213538.1544@agate.berkeley.edu> dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu (Dan Wallach) writes: >>I'd like to bring up a different topic with regard to contests: should >>they always be on PC's? > I don't see any real reason why they should or shouldn't be, except >that a bunch of PCs is probably easiest to set up. This year's finals were on AT&T WGS-6386 (386 based) workstations which were connected to the jury's computer by a network. All submissions were done using the network. This really works much better than running around with floppies. >It seemed to work better than the PC-based contests I've been at, simply >because of the electronic submission capabilities, and because >compiles and prints both ran at very reasonable speeds. Even though a 386 is often used as a PC, we too had the e-mail capabilities, we each had our own printer and the compilation speed of a 25 MHz 386 is reasonable. (VERY reasonable, in my opinion.) The biggest advantage, however, is that we didn't have to use MS-DOS. >>For college contests, however, workstations would be lots nicer [ ... ] > Yes, I think it would be possible to run a contest with some sort of >workstation (say, a net of diskless Sun 3/50s). Just like the finals! -Raymond. PS: Why my enthusiasm about the finals? We came in second!
objtch@extro.ucc.su.OZ.AU (Peter Goodall) (05/16/91)
Why not give the competitors one hour to set up the environment of their choice.I wouldn't touch pascal or c with the proverbial barge pole. So why should that
be a handicap in a competition, if it isn't in producing applications.
--
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