develooper Front page | perl.fwp | Postings from December 2001

Re: The Santa Claus Golf Apocalypse

Thread Previous | Thread Next
From:
Andrew.Savige
Date:
December 2, 2001 21:29
Subject:
Re: The Santa Claus Golf Apocalypse
Message ID:
694BB7191495D51183A9005004C0B05408DFAC@ir-exchange-srv.ir.com.au
Please take pity on Santa, on holiday here in Melbourne,
with only a Windows 98 pussbox to play with and limited
and very slow Internet access :-(.

Now, apart from an unfortunate underarm bowling incident
in cricket, we Aussies pride ourselves on good sportsmanship
(we just lost the Davis Cup cheerfully to France without
the usual crowd riots seen in some other countries:).
So, despite my relative lack of golf experience, I will
certainly try to be as fair as I can in arbiting this game.

I have had a couple of questions re, er, bugs in the
test program, tsanta.pl. Honest, I originally had a check
in tsanta.pl to ensure that noone wrote to stderr, but
Windows 98 apparently does not allow you to redirect stderr,
so I took it out. But I did say "they always write to stdout"
in the original problem specification. So anyone trying to
save a stroke with "die" will be disqualified, not because
of a nonzero exit code (which I will allow) but because
die writes an unsightly error message to stderr.

There is also a bug in the way tsanta.pl computes golf score --
it ignores newlines in the tally. I admit I did not state
this originally, but I respectfully ask now that all
contestants please format their programs on a single line.
For example:
print "blah\n" if $x;
and not:
print "blah
"
if
$x;
I request this in the interests of fairness, because I feel
that is what the majority of contestants assumed, even though
it was not explicitly stated. I would, however, still like to
congratulate Yannick for finding this loophole :).

Santa the Arbiter.

Thread Previous | Thread Next


nntp.perl.org: Perl Programming lists via nntp and http.
Comments to Ask Bjørn Hansen at ask@perl.org | Group listing | About