Programming "contests".

[Tyson Dowd]

Hi,

It appears that little Mercury programming "contests" are quite popular
among at least some people on the list.

I think it's a great idea, and I would like to continue them in future,
However, they can generate a fair bit of list traffic, so I would like
to gauge the feeling of the list on the matter.

Do people feel this is an appropriate use of the list?  Is anyone very
annoyed at the idea?  Would a standard heading (e.g. "contest:" or
something) be useful so you can separate programming discussions from other
discussions? 

Also, I'd like to take some of the posted examples and put them in 
the samples directory of the Mercury distribution, along with some
of the discussion.  

Obviously I will ask permission and put the appropriate credits on the
work, but does anyone see any problems with this?  I'd probably have to
ask people what kind of copyright they want on the work (most of the
stuff in samples is public domain or under the GNU GPL or something).
It would have to be something compatible with the Mercury license for us
to distribute it along with Mercury (GPL, LGPL, Public Domain, BSD-like,
etc). 

(If you're posting your programs to the mailing list, you might
want to put a little copyright (or public domain) notice on them
from the start, so that people known they can re-use the code directly
from the web archives of the mailing list).

-- 
Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary
safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.     - Benjamin Franklin

Tyson Dowd   <tyson at tyse.net>   http://tyse.net