[fpc-pascal] Pascal is alive!!??

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 20 Feb 2007, schreef Aavani at iust.ac.ir:

> In the ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest dropped pasc=
al
> for this year final competitions and for next year, the students are not
> allowed to use pascal as their programming language. Did you know this? W=
hat
> is your idea? Also, in TopCoder site, you can not develop your programs w=
ith
> Pascal while as I know, Pascal has all the properties that C++ or JAVA ha=
ve.
> =

> Any idea? Is there any technical problem with Pascal to be used in TopCod=
er's
> contest?

I saw this coming for a few years. Free Pascal has most definately been =

able to delay this for a few years, it was the de facto standard in =

competitions in recent years. But the trend was there. When I  =

participated myself the amount of people using Pascal was in decline, =

usually in the end it were two teams of 50 or so who used Pascal.

Note that only the *requirement* to offer a Pascal environment has been =

scrapped, organisers of contests can still provide it if they want. So, =

please lobby at the contest organisation for a Pascal environment.

The only fix here is to strengthen our position in education. Most people =

today participate in Java, which is silly as it puts you in a clear =

disadvantage. I once submitted the first non-Java implementation of a =

problem after an hour into the contest. The reference implementation of =

the jury took 10 minutes and 60 MB of memory. My Pascal implementation =

gave the result instantly, while using 300 kilobytes of memory. The jury =

was totally blown away; after the contest we did investigate and it turned =

out that Pascal text I/O versus Java text I/O was 100% responsible for =

the difference.

In short, Pascal still rocks in contests. One thing is very important: =

a rock solid text mode IDE under both Windows and Linux. This makes a =

difference in a contest. FPC has never been able to live up to the Turbo =

Pascal level here. I'd say especially the IDE in Linux was only useable =

for people knowledged with FPC to work around the limitations.

Perhaps we should ask Tom Verhoeff, he is very involved in the icpc's.

Dani=EBl