I would love to have some sort of community rating of difficulty, that made votes worth more on harder challenges. That's completely unreasonable, though, but I can dream.
@noɥʇʎPʎzɐɹC Because this thing doesn't really support linux. Even with Debian (which is the only distro that supports mixed UEFI bitness), I'd still need to build my own drivers for Wifi, battery and sound.
I want to post the question here to make sure it is suitable.
Question: Word Equations
Given a word equation, the solution must output the answer.
My definition of a 'word equation' is an equation where the operators are words.
The operators will be spelt as
add
minus
times
divide
The sol...
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I think farming reputation is a huge problem with SE because it's something that only really makes sense for games; however I think it's less of a problem on PPCG because PPCG actually is a game, fundamentally
Write the shortest program which, when run with no arguments, stdin, or user input, triggers a core dump.
Your code must behave this way when run on some common out-of-the-box Linux distribution. Other than installing support for your target language, you may not reconfigure the system to make i...
what if you suggest a genuine improvement to someone else's post in order so that, when they edit it, they bump the question, meaning more people see your highly-voted answer to the same post? I admit I have done that (was going for a streak of 200 rep every day for a week, so I delayed suggesting improvements to other people's posts until after midnight)
probably won't do it any more though
wow, I overthink things so much
8
meanwhile I've decided that my reputation is too high, being able to see deleted posts gets really annoying after a bit
@ais523 When you're finished overthinking things, can you clarify your thoughts on the inclusion of interpreter names in titles. Did you mean that every answer should include one?
Inspired by seeing a few calculator answers on this site, I dug up my CASIO fx-7000G, and I realised you can actually write some pretty complex programs on it. Because it's tokenized, and the max program size is ~400 bytes, I might actually be doing some code-golf with it. Then again, it's quite hard to do anything with only "ifs" and "gotos" :P
@ais523 What if I "accidentally" sneeze, which causes a whirl of wind to find its way to a butterfly, which, due to the gust of wind, flies into your house and brushes against your hand, temporarily distracting you and causing you to accidentally up-vote me without noticing.
@JamesHolderness I believe that it's courteous (although not currently an actual rule) to post an interpreter name in the title unless the answer is portable according to the language spec (i.e. should work in any correct intepreter that interprets the language)
(also I got a 198 recently because when I was new, I suggested an edit to a closed challenge in an attempt to make it viable; unfortunately it didn't make it viable, so when it got deleted, I lost the rep from the new user edit bonus in a way that ignores rep cap)
(in other words, the bonus to encourage edits actually left me worse off than I would have been otherwise, as getting a +2 and later a +198 is worse than getting a +200…)
@ais523 The question is still open for new answers. I think there might be some really creative and genuinely good answers out there. I did a +100 because I have 800 rep and can't afford any more.
I got downvoted on Oct 6 and Oct 27. I hit the rep cap later those days, so I didn't lose any rep from the downvotes. Both downvotes got reversed on Oct 28, but I hit the rep cap that day as well, so I didn't gain any rep from the undownvotes. Today, my rep got recalculated. The system decided none of this was fair and made the original downvotes count as -2 each.
@JamesHolderness I was one of the minor people contributing to /commenting on the Funge-98 conformance testing effort (it was mostly Deewiant), so I have a much better idea of Funge portability than most people; most of my Funge programs are portable (the only nonportable ones have been because the question was judging based on something nonportable)
PPCG is weird in that it allows people to try to find and exploit buggy interpreters; I understand the reason behind that, but it's pretty unusual as sites go
@Dennis on Slashdot, if you're downvoted enough, your posts actually start with automatic downvotes on them (even to the extent that you end up below an anonymous user)
@JamesHolderness thought it was cheating (and it would be in most communities), I think it's acceptable in PPCG but you should advertise that you're doing so
via explicitly giving the name of an interpreter where it works
@ais523 The funniest thing (to me) with your rep is how your best golfings got very little attention compared to your one-byte answer... For instance this one was very nice, but just got a few upvotes :x
Funge-98 is a little different to the original Befunge in that the spec is more detailed and there are far fewer implementation. There are hundreds of Befunge-93 implementations and a lot more variation in behaviour.
@Dada the shocking thing about that is I actually wrote the program golfed, and then had to "ungolf" it manually to write out the explanation
@Dennis right, Slashdot is home to lots of anti-censorship people, so they have a policy of never deleting or banning anything (however, merely one downvote on an anonymous post, or two on that of a newly registered user, can hide it from everyone who hasn't specifically requested to show all posts)
possible exception for illegal material, of course
@ais523 Note that I did explicitly point out that it would only work in some interpreters (which is more than most people do). You were saying that I should include an interpreter name in the title.
This is Fortnightly Challenge #6. Theme: Language Design
There's a chatroom for this challenge. Come and join us if you want to discuss ideas!
And now for something completely different...
This fortnight, we want to experiment with a new type of challenge. In this challenge, you will be de...
@JamesHolderness it's more an "I think this is a good idea" rather than "this is a rule"; I always do (unless I've simply missed the fact that it's nonportable)
huh, we have language design contests?
was CALESYTA advertised here? it was the most recent
should get some fun esolangs coming out of that one (I don't think most of the submissions are public yet)
one of the golfing languages I have in mind is a sort-of cross between Prolog and regex (which are fundamentally quite similar), but with a focus on implementation efficiency (i.e. I wouldn't want the implementation to use backtracking unless it were unavoidable)
having a faster implementation seems like it'd be useful both for general use, and for getting short answers to restricted-complexity problems
Tired of not knowing what @ais523 and @JamesHolderness were talking about, I sought and found the answer. If a solution works only with a specific interpreter, this should be mentioned in the body. Likewise, linking to an online interpreter is always a good idea. However, mentioning a specific enviroment in the header is probably overkill.
anyway, I've design tons of languages (it's one of my hobbies), but I don't always write an implementaiton
@Dennis hmm, if a program only works with a specific interpreter, then you can't easily link to an online one (unless the interpreter is itself online)
actually, I'm pretty much the opposite of that, I will nearly always try out programs offline
to the extent that I use Rhino for my JS submissions (which has the interesting side effect of being better at polyglots)
Side note: I'd like to say that I'm torn between adding interpreters in headers for answers which go against the language spec and the fact that such extra details would clutter the header. fishlanguage.com has always irked me a bit because it's commonly used but differs quite a bit from the "official" Python interpreter...
@ais523 Any thoughts on this ? It feels like a bug in Perl (!!!!), but maybe I missed something? (I'm asking you because you seem to have a good knowledge of Perl, compilation & VM, so maybe you'll be inspired)
if you put my $max on a separate line it'll start making more sense
and yes, Perl has a bit of everything in the language, and undefined behaviour is one thing it has too (although only in a few cases, it's not everywhere like in C)
I don't like (nor use) myinside conditional, but a friend sent me this, and since there is no warnings, the $max seem lexically scoped as one could expect, I thought it as legal Perl
I'm pretty sure most non-trivial languages have undefined behaviour in some way or other, since there's no way language developers can think of every single edge case
@Qwerp-Derp there are several meta posts which have definitive answers to this, unfortunately the definitive answers in question disagree with each other
what actually happens on the site is that if people like your answer, they'll upvote it based on one set of posts, if they dislike it, they'll downvote it based on the other set of posts
@ais523 The idea of TIO is to make adding more interpreters as easy as possible. Adding a new language usually doesn't take more than a couple of minutes.
@Sp3000 there's nothing obviously wrong with the page; is it a failed language design that will never work out, or is there some other reason you want it deleted?
anyway, if you edit the page (logged into your Esolang account) to text saying something like "I changed my mind about this language, please delete the page", it's likely to be deleted by me or another mod, as you're the page author
(it'd look very weird deleting a page out of the blue without confirmation that the requester and author were the same person…)
The former - it was meant to be a 2D semi-golfing language (the main reason it existed in the first place was because ><> lacked a proper command for reading in integers), but the more I went with it the more I realised that the golfiest option was usually a one-line program.
@El'endiaStarman I'd get back to it and clean it up so that the focus was less on golf and more just an extension on ><>, but if I was to clean up a language I'd probably be fixing up Slip instead
@ais523 I can see why you'd do that, and that's how Martin's been doing his languages too. In my case, I like writing the interpreter as I go just because I find it's good for finding edge cases I've missed (but yeah, both approaches work)
actually, I may as well ask the channel: suppose there's a language in which a string literal, if given out of context, is evalled to give a function, and then passed itself as an argument
in this language, would you consider "print" to be a proper quine? why or why not?
(that behaviour for literals might seem absurd, but is in fact the behaviour most programs would want in Underload, as it reduces the boilerplate you need to write loops; almost all practical Underload programs end :^)
@ais523 Tough question, as with all quine validity questions :/ Subjectively, I'd probably decide depending on whether this particular feature is useful in other ways - if it looks contrived for the sake of producing easy quines, then I'd say no.
(but based on your description that it's how you might want things to work in Underload, then maybe yes)
@Sp3000 well the thing is that Underload's only control structure is string eval, so you have to quine bits of your program to be able to write a loop, or, really, to get anything done at all
this means that anything that makes the language itself easier to write will also make quines easier
Note that I deliberately put "subjectively" in there, since it's only my personal opinion. There's a sliding scale of validity which is hard to draw the line for, from reading the whole source code in one command to g in Befunge to wraparound strings in Befunge to un-eval functions.
in Underload the answer is, usually, yes, which would make it reasonable to disqualify it from quine contests
(out of the two "common" quines, (:aSS):aSS uses the first :aSS purely as data and the second purely as code; (aS(:^)S):^ uses the contents of the outermost pair of parentheses as both via a string eval)
that said, string eval is useful in producing quines in a wide range of languages, and is normally considered to be allowed
@JamesHolderness Well not really - wraparound strings still seem to be accepted (it's a pretty unique feature though, so rules for it are a bit tough to decide on), but even without that there's other ways to quine which would be 100% valid.
@Dennis hmm, I can see the case there (although you can make a case that the print encodes the quotes around it, I think that'd be very rules-lawyery); the fact is that all the commands that you'd need to make a quine are implied by the language
this also means that you could make a quine in this hypothetical language via adding a comment before the "print" and printing the comment first!
/*foo*/ "print '/*foo*/'; print"
something seems very wrong about this to me, it's like the definition does a good practical job of defining what's a quine and what isn't, but inherently makes certain assumptions about the operation of languages as it does so
I'm not daying the definition is perfect, but it is was we're using until somebody comes up with a better one. For example, if your language is parsed right-to-left, "print" "print" would be a proper quine, since the right one print the left one and viceversa.
silly idea before I sandbox it; what would be people's reactions to an answer-chaining challenge in which the winner was the second-last person to submit (after the post had been idle for a while)
@Dennis oh wow; in the current version of the language, it parses left to right, but executes right to left, so that might actually work
I'm going to have to see if I can make a quine like this :-D
I wanted to make a polyglot answer-chain in which each program had to work in all the languages seen so far, plus one more
however, I didn't want people to intentionally make it hard to continue the challenge, which "last answer" encourages
making the second-last answer the winner means that you have to try to allow the chain to continue, but still get rewarded for the more difficult later posts
what's Ṙ specified to do? print something twice, but the first time as a string literal and the second time as a command?
that seems like a fairly convenient verb for quining purposes :-D
(incidentally, Douglas Hofstatder, who invented the noun "quine", also invented a verb "quine" with basically that meaning, in order to golf down natural-language quines)
actually, I have to admit to using TIO less for actually testing out programs, and more for getting convenient links to the specifications for golfing languages
I go to, e.g. jelly.tryitonline.net by typing it into my browser, then click the link to the language in the header
@ais523 I'm not sure whether this will necessarily work as you intend (it just takes one person to mess everything up), but while my first impression is that this is a silly idea it might actually be interesting, considering that Vickrey auctions work similarly
”Ṙ sets the left argument/initial return value to the character Ṙ. Ṙ (repr) prints a string representation of its argument (first two chars) and returns the unaltered argument. At the end, Jelly prints the last return value implicitly, producing the last character.
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ different people consider different things hard; Ranger is my go-to "still easy but different" role, Knight fits your request fairly well, Wizard is very controversial and has a large range of opinions about it
hmm, my searches show that in terms of raw DEFLATE, I don't think anyone's posted the exact bytestream, but someone posted pseudocode for a DEFLATE quine in a Reddit comment (!)
maybe I'll see if I can translate that into bytes and see if it works
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ tourists scale better than most other roles do; their start is terrible but they have unusually few limitations on how far they can improve
the melee roles are basically valkyrie (good at everything, overall overpowered); barbarian (basically valk-but-worse; nobody really enjoys playing them because of that); knight (riding-based); caveman (definitely a challenge role, they have a rough start); monk (good start, bad late-game, probably the only role like that)
samurai is hybrid melee/ranged but everyone plays it as melee in practice
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ well one of the biggest and most common criticisms of NetHack is that most of the lategame is too easy; those roles drop off as the game gets easier, which might potentially make it more enjoyable? that said, the ascension run (if you're unspoiled and want to remain so, don't look it up, you'll know it when you see it) is genuinely difficult, so bad-late roles may well just end up requiring more grinding, which would make the game less enjoyable
@DJMcMayhem it has a very specific formula, and many people who have learned that and refined it complain that it gets really easy once you know exactly what to do (i.e. only wish for this, only genocide that, don't melee floating eyes, etc.)
@DJMcMayhem I said the lategame was too easy; the rest of the game really is difficult (except for the top players), and if you're not good enough at NetHack to get through the early game and midgame, you never see the easy bits
@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I'm not 100% sure that's true either; I'm a pretty good player myself but still often have to improvise, especially early on. There are strategies which are almost guaranteed to get a win eventually but they often take years of attempts, and are also very boring and often considered exploits.
by the way, there are good game-design reasons for games with permadeath to have the difficulty front-loaded
however, the game is better off if the game, despite being easier late, doesn't feel like it's easier late
This is Fortnightly Challenge #6. Theme: Language Design
There's a chatroom for this challenge. Come and join us if you want to discuss ideas!
And now for something completely different...
This fortnight, we want to experiment with a new type of challenge. In this challenge, you will be de...
