The Nineteenth Byte

« first day (1400 days earlier) ← previous day next day → last day (3740 days later) »

Sp3000

13:58

I'm surprised I didn't get downvoted some time in the last 10 minutes - I posted an answer to a question thinking I was still in the sandbox

New Sandboxed Posts

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

RNA to Protein Translation code-golf kolmogorov-complexity RNA, like DNA, is a molecule found in cells encoding genetic information. It consists of nucleotides, which are represented by the bases adenine (A), cytosine (C), guanine (G) and uracil (U).* A codon is a sequence of three nucleotides. ...

2 hours later…

New Sandboxed Posts

16:00

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Golfscript Compiler code-golf golfscript Challenge Write a Golfscript compiler, which when given a GS program via STDIN, produces a standalone executable of the program. The executable must be able to be run on x86 Ubuntu. You can find a full spec of the language at the Golfscript website. T...

Beta Decay

16:16

@PeterTaylor I've explicitly said that support for Ruby is not required now.

I agree that it's still a big task though.

ProgramFOX

@BetaDecay What about providing a set of test cases for the challenge?

People could use these for testing their compiler.

Peter Taylor

@ProgramFOX Even that's a pretty big task. I started writing a GolfScript interpreter in Java a while back, with test cases for every piece of functionality I added. There are a lot of corner cases to catch.

ProgramFOX

@PeterTaylor True. I didn't mean a very large set of test cases, just some that can be used so you don't have to find them out yourself.

Peter Taylor

@BetaDecay The idea of making it a compiler seems a bit odd too. In order to implement ~ people are going to have to implement an interpreter, so then the sensible approach to the compiler is to make it output the interpreter and just tweak the initial state.

Beta Decay

@PeterTaylor What if I get rid of the ~?

@ProgramFOX I'll put some in later. I don't GS enough to come up with esoteric uses of the language though

Peter Taylor

16:28

Then you make it unable to handle an awful lot of real GolfScript programs

94 out of 128 GolfScript programs in one directory on my harddrive use ~

Beta Decay

Ahh yeah.

I could've sworn there was Golfscript interpreter challenge...

Found it: codegolf.stackexchange.com/q/7152/30525

So apart from the exe output, is this just a dupe of the above challenge?

Peter Taylor

Pretty much.

Beta Decay

Damn..

Peter Taylor

If you want a GolfScript-related challenge, one which I've thought about and possibly mentioned in the past would be an auto-explainer.

The idea is that you give it the code and some hints about the format of the expected input (or maybe just a range of test cases which cover all input) and it outputs a version of the code with extra annotations to distinguish e.g. between a / which performs integer division and one which loops a block over an array.

The easiest way of implementing this would be to write an augmented interpreter.

However, there are probably all kinds of horrible gotchas - fundamentally, it's an undecidable problem in the most general case.

Beta Decay

Yeah... It seems like a gargantuan task...

It's good idea though

2 hours later…

Martin Büttner

18:47

@PeterTaylor in the worst case the / could have a different function across several loops of an iteration

that sounds like you're having an idea for a popcon thought because you can't possibly find an objective criterion for such a task, can you? :P

Q: Print a Negative of your Code

Consider a square of printable ASCII characters (code points 0x20 to 0x7E) for side length N > 1, like the following (here, N = 6): =\ g \ 7 m+y "g L ~ e> PHq We also require each row and each column to contain at least 1 space and 1 non-space character. (The above example satis...

Peter Taylor

@MartinBüttner I know. I do on occasion exploit that. That's one of the gotchas which makes it a tricky task.

user2179021

19:11

did there used to be an "advanced" tag or something similar?

or is it in fact still here?

I feel sure there was a tag for harder puzzles

Martin Büttner

20:03

@user2179021 I don't recall ever having seen that

but maybe it used to be a thing

user2179021

Peter Taylor

20:21

I think there was, but it's a bad tag and was eliminated.

2 hours later…

New Sandboxed Posts

22:44

A: Sandbox for Proposed Challenges

Play Chopsticks Disclaimer: Please fix the question and the scoring if they are not satisfactory. I am probably not qualified to run and score entries because I am not entirely familiar with the logistics of running two programs against one another, and, as such, I will not be posting this quest...