As many have already stated, when I interview someone I want to find out if the candidate is capable of communicating, capable of writing code which makes sense and it can be easily understood by others, code which can be maintained and so forth.
I personally don't like to spend time in exercises like the one proposed.
Instead I'd rather give an exercise where the candidate will write code him/herself - even in a regular text editor - and from there opening a discussion based on code review, improvements as so forth. No need the code to compile: compiler will do its job, eventually.
I know many people may disagree on this approach, but so far I have found this the best way of finding good candidates.
