On Sat, 16 Feb 2002 00:40:35 +0100 Bart Lateur <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
: On Fri, 15 Feb 2002 08:53:45 -0600, Dave Hoover wrote: : : >Here is the winning solution: : > : >#!perl -l : >use POSIX;print~~strtol pop,36 : : Boo, boo! : : What an anti-climax. Utterly boring. Maybe being a mathematician I am a bit formalist, but the challenge was to use as few strokes as possible, if you didn't use strtol you lost. If you didn't want to use strtol as an option you are in your right. When I play a game I try to win, that's all. Moreover, once founded strtol, one had to squeeze the solution as much as he knew, and that required, for instance, forcing scalar context with the fewest strokes, learning about no working flags in the shebang, finding alternatives for printing all over the docs, reading perldoc perlvar ten times, reading POSIX.pm trying to discover something in the sources that could bring some advantage, and what not, the 33 frontier has been there various days to make our brains smoky. IMHO it was not not that trivial, and not boring to me. That work is the _same_ work we'll do in any future tournaments, whether they involve modules or not, and is that work and learning from the solutions of others what IMO makes golfing interesting and diverting. -- fxn
