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

[Aavani at iust.ac.ir]

What about Topcoder's and its Arena?

Daniël Mantione wrote:
> Op Tue, 20 Feb 2007, schreef Aavani at iust.ac.ir:
>
>   
>> In the ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest dropped pascal
>> 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? What
>> is your idea? Also, in TopCoder site, you can not develop your programs with
>> Pascal while as I know, Pascal has all the properties that C++ or JAVA have.
>>
>> Any idea? Is there any technical problem with Pascal to be used in TopCoder'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.
>
> Daniël