International Software Competition

[Tsarevich]

I want an advice on this issue. South East Asia Regional Computer Confederation is organising an international competition for under 17 students in Chennai, INDIA. Now that I am 14. I have some experience with C. Much that I can deal with functions, variable length arrays, and all the basic stuff.

I have never ever taken a formal course while others of my age have. Please give good advice if I should or shouldn't participate. I am talking about under 17 students, not competing with Dennis Ritchie , that must you keep in mind.

Thanks all.

[raghaven.kumar]

you should participate
atleast you will know whats the competition about
Participation matters, not Winning.

[Tsarevich]

Thanks for the suggestion. I viewed the sample questions posted by a Sri Lankan website. Too hard, not a word I could understand!

[SagaciousKJB]

Perhaps you should compete just to learn something?

I've been learning C ( at a leisurely pace though ) for the past five or six ( started when I was 14 ) years, and while I understand pretty much all of the syntax and workings of the language itself, the true challenge is realizing and understanding its use. That being the case, even though I feel like I know C, I don't really feel like I have that much skill as a programmer.

I wouldn't be surprised if you have a much better understanding of the language than I did at your age, but I wouldn't have done it at that point. The main reason is that I was still learning how C itself worked, while the focus of the competition would be based on general programming practices, like linked lists or something of that nature.


So basically, if you're well-versed enough in C at this point to be able to learn more about programming ( and not the syntax of C ), I'd say go for it. Otherwise, it might all be over your head, and not really worth the trouble if you can't learn anything because of that.

[Tsarevich]

What I get is that you didn't take a formal course as well, and studied it yourself. Because proper courses teach a language within months. Is that true?

You are correct that I must be well versed with its use. Does that mean that if someone gives me a task, then I should have the strategy to convert it into C language. True said. Its 9 or 10 months since I am learning it (with tremendous gaps in between) and I skip off basically, while there are some parts out of my understanding because it requires Maths concepts which are too advanced in C. We haven't read them in school, and.

Very surprisingly, here are the only C concepts I have:

Arrays; making decisions; looping programs; and only. I viewed the sample questions of 2007, and they were too far ahead.

[SagaciousKJB]

Yeah, I haven't taken any formal classes, but I don't know how quickly they teach the language or how quickly most students pick it up.

Does that mean that if someone gives me a task, then I should have the strategy to convert it into C language.

Essentially that is it. However, that "conversion" is typically called an algorithm. It's usually thought out originally with plain language. Say..

if var1 is greater than var2
make var1 equal to var2
otherwise
quit

Would "convert" into something similar this in C

if(var1 > var2)
     var1 = var2
else
     return

You know some basic concepts of C and other programming languages right now, but there are still more you need to know of see. Variable types, unions, structures, operators, pointers, expressions, functions, etc. These are all different parts of the language itself you'll become familiar with.

Then you have programming concepts, that use all of those elements, to accomplish a useful task. I mentioned "Linked Lists", which is a concept you might already be familiar with in creating dynamically sized arrays. You can read a bit more about that here if you want: Cprogramming.com Tutorial: Linked Lists


In any case, I would expect that the programming competition is revolved more around these "programming concepts" than around the C language itself. Perhaps something like, "Recursively search a directory of files using a linked list, printing the file and directory names distinctively."