May. 26th, 2011
1. Make an 'A' with 2000 unicode combining underlines
2. Paste into Microsoft Word
3. Restart Microsoft Word without document autorecovery
So, my other question is, if I have a programming language which specifies programs of the form "One single capital latin 'A', followed by some number N of unicode combining underlines" and processes them according to "Interpret N as a binary expression, and reinterpret it as an encoding of a perl/brainfuck program, then run it", does this mean that for the purposes of code golf writing-a-program-in-the-minimum-number-of-characters, every program will count as having only one character?
You could have a somewhat more efficient encoding by using different characters to encode more information.
I agree the idea of comparing fewest-number-of-character programs between languages is not a priori meaningful, but I think it often produces interesting results. (And the observation that there's always some imaginary language where the program you want is one or zero characters is correct, and good to make once, but does NOT invalidate the idea that it's interesting to compare different langugaes.)
This has the advantage that although the language is degenerate/isoteric, it will be the same language admitting different programs, just one-character programs, rather than only meaningful for one particular code gold challenge.
I highly advise not trying to write A-Underline code by hand, though :)
The only language I can imagine better at code gold would be the hypothetical JFGI language, which would accept programs of zero length and compile them to a program which accepts input on stdin, googles for it, and returns whatever follows on the top hit web page. That won't always work (it won't work on programs which aren't supposed to have an input), but it will work sometimes, and without all the tedious steps of _writing_ a program.
2. Paste into Microsoft Word
3. Restart Microsoft Word without document autorecovery
So, my other question is, if I have a programming language which specifies programs of the form "One single capital latin 'A', followed by some number N of unicode combining underlines" and processes them according to "Interpret N as a binary expression, and reinterpret it as an encoding of a perl/brainfuck program, then run it", does this mean that for the purposes of code golf writing-a-program-in-the-minimum-number-of-characters, every program will count as having only one character?
You could have a somewhat more efficient encoding by using different characters to encode more information.
I agree the idea of comparing fewest-number-of-character programs between languages is not a priori meaningful, but I think it often produces interesting results. (And the observation that there's always some imaginary language where the program you want is one or zero characters is correct, and good to make once, but does NOT invalidate the idea that it's interesting to compare different langugaes.)
This has the advantage that although the language is degenerate/isoteric, it will be the same language admitting different programs, just one-character programs, rather than only meaningful for one particular code gold challenge.
I highly advise not trying to write A-Underline code by hand, though :)
The only language I can imagine better at code gold would be the hypothetical JFGI language, which would accept programs of zero length and compile them to a program which accepts input on stdin, googles for it, and returns whatever follows on the top hit web page. That won't always work (it won't work on programs which aren't supposed to have an input), but it will work sometimes, and without all the tedious steps of _writing_ a program.