On 04/08/2013 10:38 PM, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
On Mon, 08 Apr 2013 21:09:08 -0400, Roy Smith wrote:
There's a whole competition about writing the smallest program which
outputs the song "99 bottles of beer":
http://codegolf.com/99-bottles-of-beer
I see the top 10 entries are all written in Perl. I suppose this says
something.
When I write my own programming language, it will include a one-character
built-in command to perform 99 bottles of beer, just so my language will
always be the winner.
In fact, I may make it a bare . so that not only will it be the shortest
program, but also the smallest program in terms of number of non-white
pixels.
But do we need a shebang line? If so, then make sure the interpreter
name is also one character long.
I expect there's a character with fewer pixels than the period, but the
utf-8 version of it would be more than one byte long. But you could
define your language with a default encoding that happens to map said
character to a single byte.
The Wang word processor (proprietary hardware and OS) used a single
pixel for \x20, and the no pixels for the \xff. This way spaces were
"visible" with a faint dot, more or less in the middle of the cell
block. It defined other symbols for other control characters like tab
and newline. I'm still looking for a similar feature for emacs (on
Ubuntu), but so far I've been disappointed by the results.
Libreoffice has a similar feature, enabled by
View->NonPrintingCharacters, but the dotted space is way too bold,
basically a period that's higher in its cell.
--
DaveA
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