[said Marcus]
>
> My school, The United States Military Academy, fielded three ADA teams this
> year and I believe that they hosted the 1999 ACM Greater New York
> Programming Contest (http://www.cs.cornell.edu/acm/year1999/). 16 answers
> were submitted in ADA. Here is the info for next year. You can be sure
> that I will be there using ADA.
[etc.]
I was about to post a correction to my own assertion that there had
been no Ada teams in the contest. I realized that indeed, West Point
had been there, and was, indeed, allowed to use Ada.
This tends to support my position that if we start sending Ada teams to
the regional contests (no matter what the "rules" seem to say), and
provide the manpower to assist in the logistics of getting Ada software
up and running in the contest system, eventually we will crack the
international contest.
Bill Poucher's note to Rush Kester pointed to the contest being
increasingly international; he revealed the well-known (to us)
ignorance of Ada's penetration in colleges and in industry around
the world. The way to prove him wrong is to send Ada teams to the
regionals (including the non-US ones!). If one of "our" teams
_wins_ at the regional level, I'm conjecturing that Bill Poucher
and company will find a way for them to do Ada in the main contest.
But don't expect him to "buy in" to a theoretical question. We will
only know when we try.
By the way - at my own institution, we've started fielding contest
teams again, after a long hiatus. Ada is the first language in our
program, but not the last, and the contest teams tend to be seniors
or maybe juniors. By that point in their college careers, they've
learned, in some combination, C, C++, and Java, and if they want to
enter the contest using what they've learned most recently, I do not
plan to stand in their way.
Mike Feldman
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