The 1999 ICFP Programming Contest
The International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP)
sponsors an annual programming contest.
We ran the contest held from September 2 to September 5, 1999.
The contest is primarily for fun, but it also serves two serious
purposes:
to show how functional languages can help
people solve hard problems quickly, and to provide a ``reality
check'' by comparing programs written in functional
languages to programs written using the more popular
imperative and object-oriented paradigms.
The contest is open to all, and entrants may use any programming
language---the only limitation is that entries must work on a
Pentium running Linux.
This 11-page paper describes the contest problem, the contestants, and
four prize-winning solutions.
It is available as
US Letter PostScript (206K),
US Letter TeX DVI (69K),