> Date: Sat, 08 Jun 2002 10:02:31 -0700 > From: Rick Klement <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > > Stephen Turner wrote: > > But why didn't the referees allow it? There's nothing in the rules > > about it, is there? And surely it wasn't just the problems with > > submitting it, because other non-printable characters are as bad. > > Did they give a reason? > > I am also interested in the reason why the refs disallowed it.
Well, people actually managed to input the other strange chars in their browser: tabs, �, and so on. But for NUL, Dave would have had to change every submission manually in PGAS --- that's the main reason. Since it was the same for everyone, the competition was still fair. Now if some golfer had had the time to fake up the HTTP and submit with a NUL, we would have had to think of something. My first idea would have been to let the scoring subtract one for every occurence of \0, for this course only, and come up with something better for the next. Now we actually had some sightings of the CR/NL issue as well, with some submissions that only worked in Linux if I stripped ^M from the ends of lines inside strings, and one other that only worked if I _left_ the ^M on the end of the flags line. The latter problem quickly disappeared as the submitter changed his method, but both point to a possible Windows/Linux incompatibility. So to be complete, the rules should specify whether solutions will be tested as submitted on either platform (i.e., with \r\n if pasted into a textarea, or exactly as sent by file input) or with 'canonical' newlines on either --- in either case refs would almost have to have both installed --- or we should find out in which cases it actually makes a difference in either version, and disallow those. (I suspect the -X flag, for some reason, and -F at end of line). > I would have a tendency to disallow a byte that matched [^ -~\n\t] > if I were in charge (oh, wait, I will be :) That would certainly make things easier --- but you'd probably have people grumbling about how 'really' their solutions were shorter than the winner because they had more $^X or \0 that should have been one less char... Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> (Humour NOT marked)
