My debbugging skills were tested by a system with bugs........

Today, I had to wake up at 7am for the programming contests. And doing that after a short sleep of 5 hours is not enough. But I finally woke up. Then in the college, me and my partner reported at the reception. Then we were given an MCQ paper each for debugging C code and general coding competition. The first impression that paper left on me was.... BAD. scaling 2/10 on the scale of quality. It was based on Borland compiler and Turbo C/C++. Which violate the ISO standards of C. Like 'void main()' which is not allowed. And use of 'getch()' and 'clrscr()' which are not a part of standard library functions.

I am not against those functions, but the contest was a C contest. Not Borland C contest. If I ever use 3rd party libraries, I use documentation. I cannot mug everything up. And so, the papers were poor. I even wrote Turbo C sucks on the question paper, which was submitted later. :-)

We ( me and my partner) were selected. He did most of the work related to Borland.... And I was providing a few logical answers.

After that we had to go through a series consisting of 5 levels. It was very good. Nothing related to Borland. All based on ISO C. There were folders locked containing problem statements. And we were given passwords once we finished the preceding level. (They were also checking the code so no point in cheating there...).

We were doing great until the last stage. Where we took about 25-30 minutes in debugging. And finished in about 1:15hours. We were the third to finish. Then there was judging. We were asked some questions based on the changes made in the code. We did very well scoring 09, 10, 10, 07, 10 in the 5 levels. Scoring 46/50. Our hopes were high. We went to the second event in that heat.

We had to code 2 programs there. Both were mathematical functions. We finished the first one quite well. And even finished the second one, but with problems in multiple inputs. In short, we did not finish the second one properly as asked. But the first one, we did. And then while judging, the judge asked, why we had not allocated the memory. Frankly speaking, I have no idea about thing thing in C. Called 'malloc()'. I only know 'new' and 'delete'. So, I let my partner speak. But he (judge) was not convinced. And he left saying that program will crash for sure. But it did not. Anyways...

So, back to prize distribution. We had our hopes high. But we were not chosen. Only 2 prizes were given and we were third. OK, they wanted to give prizes to only 2 teams. Fine. But at least write that we were third on the certificate that you (they) are giving me. But no. They gave us a certificate of participation. :-| ...

We checked with the judges and found that the first team had scored 47. The second had scored 45. And we had 46. But, as the second team finished earlier (about 25-30 mins) before us, they were declared runner ups.

No complaint there. We were slow and we had to pay the prise. BUT, even Olympics have 3 medals. At least they could have given a certificate for 3rd number......

Aditya Shevade