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Nov 2009

Hi,

I'm learning Haskell and I'm planning to solve some of the SPOJ problems as a way to exercise my progress. In another programming place I hang around, once you solve a particular problem, then you can see the solution of other contestants, which is quite useful to see how other more experienced programmers do it. Is this possible in some corner of SPOJ?

Cheers,
Ángel

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    Nov '09
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    Nov '09
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Hi angelv,
No, there's no corner of SPOJ like that.
What's this other place you hang around?

The haskell wiki has a few tips for getting started on SPOJ:
haskell.org/haskellwiki/SPOJ1
And if you have a specific question you could mail the haskell-cafe mailing list, they are usually very helpful.

You can occasionally see code posted in the forums. But its invariably buggy code with the author asking "Help me, someone please debug my program for me". They often receive help and are then very quick to remove their code from the forum, in case it benefits anyone else. I've often thought this is a very strange practice.

Maybe http://projecteuler.net/.
If you have solved a problem, you can see other's solutions.

There is a website (don't remember URL at the moment, but I think you'll find out), where you find Haskell solutions to the first approx. 200 Euler-problems. I think one can learn a lot by analyzing these solutions.

The decisive criteria for the ranking is not only an accepted result. It is also the execution time or code size or efficiency of your algo. That is why it doesnt make sense to make the solutions public.
Anyway I believe that SPOJ is an excellent platform to train your skills in any of the supported prog. languages.

To be honest, I completely disagree. Virtually all SPOJ problems come from contests where those factors are completely relevant; all that matters is whether you have solved it or not. Sure, if you come up with a better algorithm, good for you, but that makes no difference whatsoever in a contest.

I dont understand your reply. The ranking on SPOJ is based on the performance of your solution. Publishing the solutions would make the current ranking useless. Than you end up like Euler where the ranking also doesn t say very much as 100% of the solutions are public.

Not in "classical" section. There it depends only on the number of users who solved the problem.
Having a good runtime is only a question of honour ... smile

OK. When I wrote my comment I forgot the overall ranking. I meant to ranking per problem.

Hi,

yes, I was thinking about something similar to Project Euler to see solutions and learn about Haskell. The problem is that Project Euler is good for learning new stuff, but mainly mathematical concepts, rather than programming ones. SPOJ would be nice to learn about implementations of programming concepts in other languages, but I guess is more "competition-oriented" than learning oriented...

Thanks for the replies anyway.

Angel