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Postings from December 2001
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