The Nineteenth Byte

Rainbolt

16:00

ARGH. My coworker drives me insane sometimes.
Me: "You need to put steps to reproduce in the bug."
Coworker (with a smirk): "It is impossible to reproduce the bug now that I have fixed it."

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

.-.

Sp3000

@Rainbolt Me: "Have you written appropriate test cases to make sure you've fixed it and to prevent the bug from resurfacing?"

TimmyD

@Rainbolt Hah

Rainbolt

@Sp3000 We aren't there yet

We actually just introduced test case code coverage into our definition of done this sprint. I'm pretty excited about it

But, since this is the first time, we just wanted to "win" without much of a challenge, so our DoD says 5% code coverage.

It's laughable, but we'll keep increasing it

Nathan Merrill

oooh, actually, I think I got it

a = someFunc(,45)
func(a) -> someFunc(,a)

the first one is a runtime curry, second is static

Doorknob

16:07

@El'endiaStarman wow, thank you :) that means a lot

@BaldBantha fellow TIPster! \o/

Bald Bantha

@Doorknob :D

BTW, where did you learn to program?

Doorknob

@BaldBantha I think I got a Java book a few years ago, and that's what I started with. Google and Stack Overflow are the best resources, though :P

Nathan Merrill

^ this is true

Everybody at my job things I'm an incredible programmer, when all I really do is program for fun and learn stuff on SO

but then I come here, I'm just an average joe

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

lol

@NathanMerrill s/joe/nathan/

Nathan Merrill

although, I guess I can't assign cause

Bald Bantha

16:12

So basically I had an Idea of a golfing lang that used 6-bit chars to lower byte (in this case bit) count. I'll have no problem making the language itself, but I can't figure out how to write files that actually use 6-bit chars.... if anyone could help that would be great.

Nathan Merrill

either people that are naturally good programmers end up in places like these, or places like these make really good programmers

El'endia Starman

@NathanMerrill I think it's the former, though the latter will be true as well.

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@BaldBantha ... I think you would have to create your own file i/o library.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@BaldBantha interpret a stream of 8-bit bytes, and chop it into sextuplets

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

^ would also work.

El'endia Starman

16:14

For example, I can honestly attribute much of my increased proficiency with JavaScript to this site, because I've created the Minkolang online interpreter and the Spacewar! KotH.

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

Same with most of my programming skills outside python.

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ ... are you sure you fixed jolf?

Bald Bantha

@El'endiaStarman Crash course games with andre meadows "spacewar" (exclamation mark!)

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ eh? what's wrong?

Sp3000

@NathanMerrill ...both :P

El'endia Starman

@BaldBantha Bahaha, yes. "Spacewar....exclamation mark!"

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

16:15

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ oh, nvm.

But add a favicon and remove the console logs please.

Nathan Merrill

ok, poll: KoTH or KotH or KOTH?

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

KOTH.

Bald Bantha

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ but how to write a file? I mean, I can write a programming lang that uses only 64 chars, but unless I can actually encode them into 6-bit chars than I still have a byte per char

Nathan Merrill

:)

El'endia Starman

I've been doing KotH, but I may end up doing KOTH just because it's easier to type.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

16:16

KotH

Bald Bantha

King of the Hill. We are programmers, we can type fast enough

El'endia Starman

And it looks nicer.

Nathan Merrill

I mean, I've always done KoTH, but it makes the least sense

and I think that KoTH looks the best :)

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

KOTH ftw.

Nathan Merrill

KOtH

El'endia Starman

16:17

@QPaysTaxes Actually, I didn't. I was probably one of very few that never went to one of their hockey games. I think my fiancée has, though. If you're any more social than I was, then you probably will go to at least one game. :P

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@NathanMerrill kotH

El'endia Starman

@BaldBantha And it's even faster to type "KOTH"... :P

Nathan Merrill

lol, the Hill is more important than the king

Bald Bantha

@QPaysTaxes But how would I write a binary file? because, say I have 2 chars: 12 bits. Not divisible by 8, so I can't use that

Zgarb

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ Nice find! And 1 = _. gives 1, but 1 = __ + _ gives 0. :P

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

16:18

@NathanMerrill Nature made the hill, the dude made himself the king.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@Zgarb Thanks! And that's weird ._.

PhiNotPi

I vote KOTH

Bald Bantha

@QPaysTaxes And the zeroes count as bits, so the actually binary file is using 1 byte chars

Rainbolt

strawpoll.me/10192940

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

Let stars be our weapon!

Rainbolt

16:19

It sure is hard to tell the different between 'k' and 'K' in Gloria Hallelujah font

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

Cuteness alert.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@BaldBantha you need a thing to interpret a string as 6-bit chars (e.g. "!@#" => 100001 000000 100011), join them (100001000000100011) and split into 8ths: ["10000100", "00001000", "11"] and convert to chars. Something like that.

Nathan Merrill

wow, I didn't expect KoTH to get 2 votes

who voted with me?

Bald Bantha

@QPaysTaxes So I don't even need to deal with those? brainfuck uses 8 chars total, so does it get to use 3-bit chars? because then I'd always be winning with brainfuck

wizzwizz4

I made my first post on retrocomputing.stackexchange.com.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

16:21

Or, rather, 11000000

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

browses updates: XCode command line tools, itunes, and camera software. Installs only the essential one

wizzwizz4

I got Popular Question!

I got Nice Question!

Rainbolt

By the way, according to AcronymFinder, Order of the Phoenix is abbreviated OotP, but King of the Hill is abbreviated KOTH (all caps)

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

Chat mini challenge: given a string s, output something like this (s = Hello, World!)

            H
           He
          Hel
         Hell
        Hello
       Hello,
      Hello,
     Hello, W
    Hello, Wo
   Hello, Wor
  Hello, Worl
 Hello, World
Hello, World!
ello, World!
llo, World!
lo, World!
o, World!
, World!
 World!
World!
orld!
rld!
ld!
d!
!

wizzwizz4

I got Notable Question!

Bald Bantha

16:22

@QPaysTaxes So confused now.

El'endia Starman

@Rainbolt Look up Lord of the Rings. Is it LotR or LOTR?

wizzwizz4

I got 15 upvotes!

Bald Bantha

@El'endiaStarman spoken it doesn't matter

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

LoTR generally?

wizzwizz4

I got 11 answers!

Rainbolt

16:23

LOTR (according to acronymfinder)

Bald Bantha

pronounced lotter

@QPaysTaxes So create own OS to use 6 bit bytes? ._.

El'endia Starman

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ <marquee>Hello, World!</marquee>

2

wizzwizz4

Nobody's expressing interest!

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

...

@wizzwizz4 I don't know why!

wizzwizz4

It's on the HNQ list!

Rainbolt

16:24

Also, urbandictionary corrects term=LotR to term=LOTR in the url

Luis Mendo

@Dennis I would like to know your opinion on the followwing, whenever you have time. I'm considering changing MATL's encoding to reduce byte count. Do you think the following would be considered acceptable? Since MATL only uses the 95 printable ASCII characters (also linefeed, but that can be unified with space), I was thinking of "base-95 to base-256" encoding. That is, interpret the source as the digits of a number in base 95, and convert to base 256.

I think this does qualify as a character encoding, only with chars not byte-aligned. What do you think? I've seen that Bubblegum reads raw bytes, so this would fall under that category too?

This encoding need exist only for byte count purposes; the MATL compiler could also read a more standard such as ASCII characters encoded in UTF-8 (as it does now). The first bit could be used for distinguishing (the old, standard encoding always begins with a 1). So I could even define an encoding that actually includes the two: if first bit is zero interpret as the old encoding; if it's 1 remove it and interpret as new encoding.

Sorry for the wall of text!

Bald Bantha

@LuisMendo NO U TOOK THAT FROM ME

NONONONONONO

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@El'endiaStarman All hail the glory of <marquee>!

quartata

@BaldBantha ?

Luis Mendo

@QPaysTaxes Exactly. ASCII ends in 127, so first bit is always 0

@BaldBantha ? Has this been done before in some language?

@QPaysTaxes That wouls save about 18% bytes :-)

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

16:29

@LuisMendo He's trying to make his own thing, similar to that

Bald Bantha

16 mins ago, by Bald Bantha

So basically I had an Idea of a golfing lang that used 6-bit chars to lower byte (in this case bit) count. I'll have no problem making the language itself, but I can't figure out how to write files that actually use 6-bit chars.... if anyone could help that would be great.

Sp3000

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ q_,,W%Sf*\f+zN*

Luis Mendo

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ So is this a widely accepted thing? I wanted to know your opinion before applying it.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

cool!

Martin Büttner

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ I think this is an actual challenge

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

16:31

@MartinBüttner I thought it looked familiar :/

Luis Mendo

@BaldBantha Well, it's essentially base conversion, right?

Sp3000

I was wondering myself...

Martin Büttner

39

Q: Fake Marquee Text

In this challenge fake marquee text is text that is shown part by part, in a scrolling-like fashion. Some examples: testing 4 t te tes test esti stin ting ing ng g hello 2 h he el ll lo o foobarz 3 f fo foo oob oba bar arz rz z Something a bit longer 10 S So...

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@LuisMendo Oh, sure. Jelly has the same sort of thing--something that reads both UTF-8 and an encoded file.

Bald Bantha

@LuisMendo I guess.... trying to figure it out. I assumed it would be easier to write pure binary to files than it really is.

Luis Mendo

16:32

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ But this is different, because this wouldn't e byte-aligned. Each char would ocupty less than 1 byte.

I hope it's ok

Sp3000

@MartinBüttner "Nice use of z. Assuming the input is printable ASCII, you can replace W% with $". Hah, history repeats itself.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@LuisMendo It should be. You can always ask on meta.

Luis Mendo

@BaldBantha I don't think you can write them. But you can convert to bytes, then write. I have a Matlab function for base conversion, if interested just let me know. You can input base-64 digits and it gives you base-256 (i.e. bytes)

Bald Bantha

@LuisMendo No its fine it was just that I had just brought that up and it looked like you had taken it as inspiration and decided to implement it in your own language

Luis Mendo

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ That was my idea. But first I wanted to ask here more informally

El'endia Starman

16:34

@Doorknob :) Part of the reason I said that is that I think raw talent is somewhat meaningless if it's not maintained and developed. Similar to the idea one of my teachers had about IQ: a high IQ is like having a big bucket, but you still have to fill it with water. I certainly have/had a talent for math and programming, but I'm only as good as I am now because I kept doing them for years.

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

I'm sure the community would be okay with it.

wizzwizz4

I'm just excited that my first post on a site, rather than crashing and burning, is *the most famous on the site*, and *the first HNQ for the site*.
Sorry for the spam, if anybody wants to know more about it ping me, and if not, I will keep quiet. I was writing this edit before you posted that.

Luis Mendo

@BaldBantha I thought about it independently :-) I guess it's the obvious thing for a lanaguage with less than 256 chars

Bald Bantha

@LuisMendo yeah

Luis Mendo

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ I hope so! Thank you! I'll probably post a question soon. Unless it becomes clear that it's totally unnecessary

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

16:35

^^

El'endia Starman

@wizzwizz4 You're not talking about PPCG, are you?

wizzwizz4

@El'endiaStarman No.

Sp3000

Not to knock the wind out of both of your sails, but for reference sub-byte encodings have been discussed before, just saying :P

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@El'endiaStarman Retrocomputing

wizzwizz4

Yes. If anybody wants a link to the question, let me know. I will be quiet now, speaking only when spoken to unless I really want to say something.

Luis Mendo

16:35

@Sp3000 Can you give me a pointer? What was the result of the discussion?

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@wizzwizz4 I'd like a link :)

wizzwizz4

15

Q: Why was BASIC built into so many operating systems?

There are a lot of retro-computers with BASIC as an integral part of the operating system. The IBM 5100 was one of the first computers with a separate memory space for BASIC, followed by the Commodore PET, Apple II and TRS-80. But why was BASIC built into their operating systems, using memory? F...

atari-basic color-basic applesoft-basic operating-system

d:-D

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ Maybe you could join the site, and ask a question yourself!

Bald Bantha

@LuisMendo docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/…

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

I would, but I don't know much about the topic :p

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

May I ask a question about emulating MS DOS?

@BaldBantha ಠ_ಠ

and ^^

In colloquial english, and this isn't exactly formal.

Luis Mendo

16:39

Interesting how this stuff is taking more messages than the question itself :-)

Bald Bantha

Banthas can't spell

Luis Mendo

^^^

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@wizzwizz4 I did post a question on retrocomputing.se.

Sp3000

@LuisMendo Not sure, sorry. I don't think it was about 95 -> 256 specifically (and trying to look for something similar in the transcripts only reveals Doorknob's dislike for > 128)

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

?

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

16:43

@QPaysTaxes noice!

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@BaldBantha yes, they can.

They are smarter than the stormtrooper that ride them, by not charging a dude with a lightsaber willingly.

Luis Mendo

@Sp3000 Ok :-)

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@QPaysTaxes Speling is totaly moar importent!!

Bald Bantha

@EᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏIʀᴋ I just got wrecked

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

s/w.+$/rekt/

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

16:46

\o/ I think I just outgolfed an answer in the same language for the first time!

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

:D

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

I won't say, until I note that my rep is 99^2 :D

sorry, so much :D

Sp3000

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ Example usage?

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

Lowest byte count in language X is N, and I post another submission in language X with a byte count M where M < N.

0

A: Fake Marquee Text

J, 15 bytes i:@#|.!.''"0 1] Woo! Outgolfed another answer in J for the first time!

Dennis

@Mego I'm getting an error.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "seriously.py", line 15, in <module>
    from . import SeriouslyCommands
SystemError: Parent module '' not loaded, cannot perform relative import

Sp3000

16:52

@CᴏɴᴏʀO'Bʀɪᴇɴ Er... do you use the numerical argument at all?

Cᴏɴᴏʀ O'Bʀɪᴇɴ

@Sp3000 aw sh**

Sp3000

Dear the two people who upvoted funky-looking J without knowing what was going on: Why.

8

Luis Mendo

@Sp3000 :-D

Dennis

@LuisMendo That's definitely a valid encoding. If there's a x byte file that does what it's supposed to, the score is x bytes.

2

@LuisMendo I'd use a command-line flag to distinguish between the two modes. Saves one bit.

If the default is the custom encoding, it doesn't.

Alex A.

@Sp3000 Unfortunately this happens often. I've seen APL answers that are invalid but have a bunch of upvotes.

El'endia Starman

16:57

@QPaysTaxes Specifically esolangs.

Alex A.

Why would you want a game on TIO?

3

El'endia Starman

Mostly PPCG-made ones.

Sp3000

Esolangs + Julia

Luis Mendo

@Dennis Thanks! So no need to ask in Meta, right?

Sp3000

Which basically means... esolangs + Julia + any other programming language Dennis has installed, via Julia

Dennis

16:58

@LuisMendo I don't think so. x bytes is x bytes.

Luis Mendo

@Dennis That's what I thought / hoped. I just wanted to make sure. Thanks!

Alex A.

@Sp3000 Do you have a link to the answer in question?

Dennis

@QPaysTaxes Only programming languages, sorry.

Sp3000

@AlexA. See Conor's oneboxed link

But yeah, it happens too often, unfortunately. But getting everyone to test everything is also impractical... :/

Eᴀsᴛᴇʀʟʏ Iʀᴋ

@Sp3000 And julia doesn't count as a esolang? :P

/s

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