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2002 ICFP Programming Contest

Posted by michael on Friday August 30, 2002 @07:00AM from the gentlemen,-start-your-ides dept.

Phil Bewig writes "The 2002 ICFP Programming Contest begins today. The programming task will be posted at 12:00 noon Pacific Time." Which should be... just about... now.

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Re:C++ vs. SML for language by cpeterso · 2002-08-30 09:23 · Score: 4, Insightful

the ICFP doesn't usually have problems that are much better suited for functional languages.

That is definitely not true. The tasks are specifically chosen to highlight the unique strengths of functional programming languages, especially compared to imperative languages like C++. This robot problem is a heuristic optimization problem whose solution would require analyzing large trees of possible moves. To do this in C++, you would need to write lots of code that many functional programming languages provide for free. Don't forget Philip Greenspun's Tenth Rule of Programming: "any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc informally-specified bug-ridden slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."

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cpeterso