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

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 20 Feb 2007, schreef bisma at brawijaya.ac.id:

> > 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.
> 
> I did lobby them since the first time they had intention to drop pascal, but
> they simply didn't listen to me. :P The regular online contest still allows
> pascal though, they just don't want to see pascal on the final stage. Another
> thing that made me disappointed is they still use the old FPC v.1.0.6! They
> didn't care even when I told them to upgrade to FPC v.2.0.2 (the last version
> available at the time). :( 

Well, I still have many contacts in the ICPC world. It can still use them, 
but I need backup, since I already lobbied hard in the past. So please 
continue the lobby. Each year, also for the finals, each contest 
orginaising comittee decides what languages to offer. So, each year is a 
new opportinity to convince people to offer Pascal.

> > 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.
> 
> Absolutely correct! The funny thing is, most of top rank solutions are done
> using C or C++. Very little of them is using Java, but still they insist to
> allow Java! Pascal didn't do as much as C or C++ (yet) just because pascal
> isn't very popular in their community. But if we want to involve ourselves in,
> I believe pascal is able to beat C or C++, as some of my friends (from
> Indonesia) did it. 

Yes, Pascal perfectly suitable for contest, and due to lower LOC counts 
preferable over C++. A problem is the STL though, C++ coders can sometimes 
take shortcuts here; while juries somehow seem tempted to forbid the use 
of units in Pascal (an issue I made myself angry about many times in the 
past).

> > 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.
> 
> FPC text mode IDE is indeed very good and easy to use for common programming
> purposes, both on win32 console and linux terminal. I use it all the time when
> I code on remote servers. Of source you can't expect it to be as complete as
> or as easy as GUI IDE like Lazarus since it works on text mode, but it does
> the best thing it could for a text based IDE. 

In the past, Turbo Pascal gave people the biggest advantage, since you 
develop and debug your program a lot faster than with gcc or Java. FPC has 
never given these benefits. I've used the FPC IDE in the past, but it 
always working around the limitations of FPC IDE in xterm. Debugging with 
gdb wasn't worse than using the FPC IDE. This affects the decisions for 
teams what language to use.

Lazarus, with all its RAD stuff, is terribly in the way. I have done 
two contests with Delphi as IDE, and while it works very well, for 
this kind of development an IDE that is focussed just code really helps.
Further, few contest organizers have been installing Delphi in the past, 
but many installed the text mode IDE, so this is to focus on.

Daniël