[maeon3]

If you are using an IDE like Eclipse or anything with auto code completion, syntax color-highlighting, and syntax error highlighting, get rid of that while coding up the exercises in the PDF.

Use Notepad++ or kwrite and disable those features, if your coding speed grinds to a halt under these conditions, good!

That's the point of the exercise, like trying to jog at 30 thousand feet, as you overcome the hindrance up there, and you come back down to normal level, you feel like you can leap over a car. Same with coding, you feel like you can code blindfolded. And your ability/productivity increases by an order of magnitude.

[gummadi]

One of my friend always take his personal laptop to the onsite interviews and asks the interviewer permission to type code on his IDE for whiteboard exercises. He didn't have a problem and infact most of them are more than happy to allow him to do so.

[azov]

Not sure it's a good idea. Remember why your interviewer is asking those questions? So that he can compare candidates. You're making his job a bit harder because you now have advantage over people who did it on a whiteboard.

[eru]

The other candidates could have asked as well.

When on the job, there's no such thing as cheating [1], so I'd like to see any prospective employy act as pro-active as that. (And if I really need comparability, I'd thank the candidate for their good idea, but explain why we are going with the whiteboard instead.)

[1] Modulo conforming to laws and ethics.

[berlinbrown]

Some even recommend writing the on paper, I find it hard to do.