hello, Greg Morrisett wrote:

Iavor S. Diatchki wrote:

...

what would be cool is to have a place where one has many versions of the same program, but each written in the "most natural" way for the particular language --- a kind of "rosetta stone" for programming languages.

The ICFP programming contest (and other contests) serve this purpose pretty well. I've found it very instructive to stare at solutions in languages with which I'm not familiar. And the tasks at hand tend to be more realistic (e.g., rendering) than micro-benchmarks.

that's a good point! one thing i don't like about programming contests, is that usually time is very limited, so often one ends up with terrible hacks that kind of work... one might argue though, that "real programmers" are often faced with such situations. -iavor