2shortplanks writes "For the first time ever, the British Computer Society have been convinced to allow competitors in their annual UK programming competition to code entries in Perl. Entry for the first round closes on the 20th February." Read on for more details.
The competition requires programming teams to code a challenge within a set period of time in a controlled environment. There are sample questions on the website. By the accounts of the Perl Mongers I've spoken to that have entered in the past I gather it's a lot of fun.
London.pm would like to thank its members who are volunteering to be judges at the heat that trials Perl as a programming language at the IBM Hursley Site on the 6th March. Unfortunately, no other heat this year will be able to accept Perl entries.
Entrants will be required to be BCS members to compete, but they can join at the same time as they enter the competition. There is also a twenty five pound entry fee per team.
As I know you're all going to ask me this: You'll be using ActiveState Perl 5.6.1 on Windows. You can use Eclipse, gvim, GNU Emacs, Nano or Notepad if you really want. You won't be able to use CPAN (as half the problems probably have stock answers) though if there's a particular facility missing in the Perl distribution that the other languages have that is required for the competition (e.g. XML Parsers) then the judges will pre-install modules before the competition.
Good Luck.
Re:Perl in Programming Competitions
2shortplanks on 2004-02-11T09:42:24
Oi, you're meant to be impartial to all languages you're judging.;-) Re:Perl in Programming Competitions
lorip on 2004-02-11T17:01:16
ActiveState has offered to provide licences to our Komodo IDE for Perl programmers entering the competition. We're waiting to hear back from the judges.
