🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1991May12.213538.1544@agate.berkeley.edu> dwallach@soda.berkeley.edu (Dan Wallach) writes:
>I'd like to bring up a different topic with regard to contests: should
>they always be on PC's?

  I don't see any real reason why they should or shouldn't be, except
that a bunch of PCs is probably easiest to set up.  The first regional
contest I went to was on a VAX/VMS system, with a little menu-driven
system so if you didn't know VMS commands you weren't at a particular
disadvantage (though knowing the editor helped), and so that you could
only do editing, compiles, prints, and (electronic) submissions.  It
seemed to work better than the PC-based contests I've been at, simply
because of the electronic submission capabilities, and because
compiles and prints both ran at very reasonable speeds.  Also, it made
restricting the contest to the standard languages (Standard Pascal and
FORTRAN 77) trivial.

>For college contests, however, workstations would be lots nicer [ ... ]

  Yes, I think it would be possible to run a contest with some sort of
workstation (say, a net of diskless Sun 3/50s).  It'd be more work
than using PCs, though, and I suspect one can make an argument that
using PCs is more "fair" because more colleges have PCs than have any
particular kind of workstation....

	Anton
   
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| Anton Rang (grad student) | rang@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison | "VMS Forever!" |
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