I was once at a regional open source conference - "MRMCD" (kind of the local branch of CCC) which was fun.

And they had a golfing competition, with online submission. You were allowed to choose the language, and at the end of the conference the winners were declared by language.

And I was very confident to win in Perl, since practically nobody there knew Perl.

To my great astonishment I was beaten by large distance, and I was very curious to learn these new advanced techniques.

Now what happened was: the test cases were given in advance, i.e. input on STDIN and expected output on STDOUT and automatically tested for all contributions.

While I tried to process the input did the winner just do something like print "EXPECTED OUTPUT"

Well ...