In 1998, the heat event was replaced by a pre-competition assessment. All participants were asked to work on the pre-competition assessment task and submit a floppy diskette containing the source code and executable of their programs. The list of finalist were determined solely by the programs submitted. However, it raised concerns about the fairness of the competition, since there is no way to ensure that the submitted program was really written by the participant. At that time, the only programming language allowed was Pascal.