In my experience the speed decrease isn't worth it during competitions. I heard some talk about allowing Python at the International Olympiad in Informatics ht

In my experience the speed decrease isn't worth it during competitions. I heard some talk about allowing Python at the International Olympiad in Informatics http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml http://www.ioinformatics.org/index.shtml (in addition to Pascal and C(++)) but that's probably far off