[fpc-devel] Pascal to Java compiler

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Tue, 2 Dec 2008, schreef Alexander Klenin:

> On Fri, Nov 28, 2008 at 07:59, Daniël Mantione
> <daniel.mantione at freepascal.org> wrote:
>> One time, during a programming contest, the jury had written their solution
>> to a problem in Java. A 10MB output file had to be written. Their
>> implementation took about 15 minutes and took about 60 MB of memory.
>>
>> During the contest, I was the first one to solve the problem and my program,
>> of course coded with FPC, took something like 0,15s while using 200k of
>> memory.
>
> I have a related story -- the jury of the famous ACM ICPC
> (http://icpc.baylor.edu/)
> has disallowed Delphi language a few years ago (only C/C++ and Java remain).
> The rumored reason was that Delphi gives "unfair advantage" to teams
> (mostly Russian ones) using it.

The requirement to offer a Pascal programming environment has been 
removed. Individual ACM contests are free to offer a Pascal programming 
environment and if you are affected by this decision I recommend you to 
point this out to the organisers of your ICPC contest.

The issue of unfair advantage is bogus, because the VCL is mostly useless 
except perhaps for Tlist, while the C++ STL can be definately of use in an 
ICPC contest.

Daniël