Re: New ACM challenge is language-discriminatory

[Stephen Leake <stephen_leake@stephe-leake.org>]

Georg Bauhaus <rm.dash-bauhaus@futureapps.de> writes:

> Jean-Pierre Rosen schrieb:
>> ACM has launched a new programming challenge:
>> http://queue.acm.org/icpc/index.cfm?page=faq
>> 
>> However, the only languages allowed are C++, C# and Java.
>
> Just a thing that I noted when last looking at
> ACM Queue (a while ago), namely that the language
> selection seems to be in accord with
>
> (a) ACM sponsors,
>
> (b) perception of dominating languages in magazines
> for job seekers, CS professors, and labor merchants.
>
> And maybe they don't have Ada staff to look at solutions
> written in languages other than the currently supported?

The competition doesn't mention anything about needing to read the
code.

Once you sign in, you can get more info:

    Player implementations are external to the game itself. A player
    is a separate executable that communicates with the game via
    standard input and standard output. The player is executed when
    the game starts up and continues running until the game is
    finished. At the start of each turn, the game engine sends the
    player a description of the game state. The player reads this
    description from standard input, chooses a move and sends it back
    by writing it to standard output.

    ...

    Player code will be compiled and will run on a virtual machine
    running on a 3.0 Ghz Xeon processor installed with version 5.2
    CentOS. Java submissions will be compiled and run with version 1.6
    of the Sun JDK, and C++ submissions will be compiled with version
    4.1.2 of g++. 

So there's no technical reason the code can't be in Ada. Or any other
language supported by the CentOS distribution!

-- 
-- Stephe