[fpc-pascal] Pascal support in the Kattis educational site

[James Richters]

>Maybe the results backend uses higher precision result values, and the web interface simply rounds it to two decimal places? ;-)

It seems most likely that the results are evaluated at more than 2 decimal places.  I don't know why they would only display 2 decimal places, 1/100th of a second is a virtual eternity when it comes to processor time... thus proven by the huge number of 0.00s results in the list.. in order to display 0.00, the run time had to be less than 0.005s,  but that's not surprising with a processors running in the GHz.   You would think that after the site was running for 1 day they would have realized they needed to display more precision then 2 places.

When I was try to get timing information for efficiency comparison between procedures, I ended up having to run the test procedure in a loop at least 1000 times, sometimes 10million times because if I did not do that, they system timer resolution was not high enough to get an accurate count.  

It would be very interesting to see the timings to more precision, because I would think that some of the timings would be exactly the same because when it comes down to optimizing procedures,  different people could end up arriving at the exact same solution as far as the structure of the program is concerned.    They should also rank other aspects such as compiled program size, amount of memory used, User Interface design (input and output clarity and formatting), effectiveness of documentation....etc. the best program isn't necessarily the one that executes fastest...  Which is a 'better' program: program A that executes in 0.00018s that uses 1MB of RAM or Program B that executes in 0.00016s that uses 100MB of RAM 

James