ಠ_ಠI hate the nether. Managed to get half-iron and a lit portal in <5 minutes, then spent 1hr 30 looking for a fortress, getting blaze rods and trading, and I still only have 7 eyes
I'm trying to "pseudo-speedrun" (aka do things quickly rather than slowly), so I didn't die. Took ages to find a fortress tho :/
The overworld seed is crazy good tho. 2 villages (one blacksmith), a desert temple and a ruined portal all within like 100 blocks of spawn, plus you get enough obsidian in the chests to complete the ruined portal
So I would've lava-pool-portal if I had to, didn't bother with gathering armour before going into the nether etc. I got Stone Age when a piglin gave me blackstone :P
@Underslash Yeah, I suppose that's a good term for it :P
@cairdcoinheringaahing I have now found 4 villages, 3 desert temples and 4 ruined portals from spawn to someone on my way to the stronghold, this is crazy :P
Japt and Pip aren't known specifically for their flags, though, and I'm sure their designers wouldn't replace them with different forks of the language if flag scoring changed
CGCC: allows flags to not be counted Vyxal: uses flags to gain an advantage CGCC: how could you do this?! if you have a problem with the flags, change the rules, don't go after someone for making their golflang more golfy :P
i'd also say that if we add flag scoring back that'll just normalize putting large amounts of code in flags which is an aesthetically nightmarish way of saving a byte or so on something that might otherwise be a separator within the program
whereas that's currently just not allowed since it's equivalent to metagolfscript
One of the options is unfair to some languages and will allow ways to golf things that are very annoying and less fun. The other works perfectly fine, as long as nobody abuses it, which we apparently can't rely on. No win either way :/
id say 50% of the flags in vyxal are what would be considered normal flags, and then the other 50% you dont see as often despite them saving a single byte usually
the whole goal of code golf is to find short, creative solutions to problems, and flags dont take away from that, as any code they remove could always be added back (which arguably can make solutions less elegant at times)
so if a flag detracts from an answer, just dont use it
I've said it before, I'll say it again: if the only way to make your challenge interesting is to ban builtins, your challenge will never be interesting
it's simply answerer ettiquette to also provide what they personally judge to be a non-builtin solution if they would consider their main solution to be just a builtin
@rak1507 Slightly disagree: downvote, don't not upvote. IMO upvoting is for good answers, downvoting is for answers that abuse things and not doing either is the standard
redwolf, correct me if I'm wrong, but you said "The point of code golf is to write short code, not elegant code." by that logic, shouldn't you use every available method of coding in your language to do that, thus using flags in vyxal when needed?
> An empty MetaGolfScript-N program behaves identically to the Nth possible GolfScript program. Programs are enumerated first by size, then by lexicographic order. E.g. program 0 is empty, program 1 contains a single NUL character, and so forth.
but yeah so de jure there is no such advantage because it only competes against itself but nobody actually looks at answers and ranks them just within each language there's always an aspect of which language is better suited to the challenge, and it gets much harder to judge when there's 10 different variants of one language that only get used when they're better suited than the other 9
i feel like before this discussion continues we should make sure we all get that you don't have to have a bijection between individual characters and commands
like, when was the last time answers to challenges were actually accepted? no one does it anymore because the implied competition is always "what is the lowest you can golf this challenge in this language"
not what's the lowest byte count you can get to in any language
> Although officially an answer which uses flags will not compete with non-flag answers, I doubt anyone who golfs on CGCC would deny that they compare their answers to other languages of a similar golfiness, or that they have some sort of classification of languages' golfiness in their minds. Flags are cheating, if not officially. We still heavily downvote MetaGolfScript answers, despite them also not being cheating under these rules.
We've all heard of the Knight's Tour puzzle: find a route for a knight that passes through all the squares on a chess board. But let's be honest, it's a little bit boring. So, let's give the knight a bit of a challenge.
Task
Write a program that takes the knight through all the squares on an arbi...
@cairdcoinheringaahing ಠ_ಠIt gets worse: the tunnel I dug straight down to get to the stronghold, if I had been one block to the side, I would've dug into a cave which lead directly to the portal room
lets have a thought experiment then, if we had a program with very creative and intricate golfing, but it "abused" a flag to shave off a byte, would you downvote? was the golfing not the more significant aspect? and why not just imagine the code with that extra byte and then be satisfied?
@RedwolfPrograms I've gotten the gist of it, you say "If you aren't gaining anything by using flags, then why are you using them?" and the answer to that is: "save bytes"
@rak1507 I already discussed what flags I consider cheating, and those are the ones that offload actual program behavior, rather than aspects of the interpreter, to flags
I think that flags is a topic worth discussing, and I don't want to shut that down. However, this has escalated a bit too much at the moment, so we'll pause the discussion for today and y'all can come back to it later when things are slightly calmer
but yeah so honestly my position is that nothing should be done about the current flag situation but as a community we should understand that we should avoid more of it