The ACM international programming contest used to require either C/C++ or Java (as of 2004 that is). The thing is, aside from their server doing compiling, I do

The ACM international programming contest used to require either C/C++ or Java (as of 2004 that is). The thing is, aside from their server doing compiling, I don't see why it couldn't have been any other language. They were incredibly anal about getting output exactly correct for their automated script checkers, and since that worked with stdin/stdout, most programming languages would have been perfectly fine. If you can avoid limiting which languages are allowed, do so. If you need to provide some sort of library, would XML-RPC work for it? You could easily write a client for a large number of languages.