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.
I'll try but can't promise you the result as I think those people -mostly-
underestimate pascal. You know, very C/C++ programmers typical. They just
simply ignore what pascal can do nowadays. :P
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).
Agree. I think they should allow common/standard modern pascal units, such
as sysutils and classes. Without them, we almost need to rewrite all usable
classes and functions/procedures by ourselves.
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.
Ah, the debugger! You have a point here. I forgot to mention it because I
rarely use it. :D
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.
Just forget the GUI IDE, programming contests don't need a bloated hard to
configure IDE. No offense for Lazarus. But IMO a GUI IDE is just overkill
for algorithm/logic programming purposes. A fully working text mode IDE is
more than enough.
-Bee-
has Bee.ography at:
http://beeography.wordpress.com
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