[kw-pm] Last night's meeting

John Macdonald john at perlwolf.com
Fri Jun 19 08:29:20 PDT 2009


On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 11:15:57AM -0400, John Macdonald wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 19, 2009 at 10:55:25AM -0400, Daniel R. Allen wrote:
> > ...We had considered the ?:1 operator, on the board, but didn't see where
> > it got us. Clearly we didn't stare at it long enough.
> > 
> > But turning rand()<1/++$n into rand++$n<1 into rand$.<1 is sheer genius
> > on both of your parts. Nicely done, John and Raymond.
> > 
> > 29 strokes == winner?
> 
> In my previous message, I talked about "cheating" by providing
> executable code that is not part of the char count in various
> ways (-M switch, and the filename).
> 
> But that trick I played on the -n switch made me realize that
> using -n is similarly a cheat because it provides code that is
> not counted.
> 
> So what is the best non-cheating char count?
> 
> $ perl -e '@a=<>;print at a[rand(@a)]' <alpha.html
> 
> That's better than the "cheating" we've been doing using -n!
> 
> And then, it can be golfed down a bit more to:
> 
> $ perl -e 'print at a[rand(@a=<>)]' <alpha.html
> 
> 
> So, that's down to 18 chars, with no supporting cheats of any kind.

However, I haven't seen the original challenge - does it require
that the program handle input that is too large to fit in memory?


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