As long as you don't use it in a cheaty manner. And any of them could be fine if without the flag it'd still be an allowed input or output format.
The timeout ones are fine for running the code, although if you used them in a challenge involving timing I'd consider it cheating
I think of an interpreter not as one black box, but as three. One that takes input from the user or environment and turns it into data usable by the code, one that runs the code with input and output that's valid within the language, and one which takes that data and represents it as a string for interacting with the user
"Printing an array" makes no sense if you think of an interpreter as a single black box
"Outputting an array which is represented with space separated items" makes sense, but I'd call that an array, not a space separated string
So using that in a challenge that requires space separated strings would be cheating imo
Basically I think they're perfectly fine if they aren't being used as part of the challenge itself (e.g., using a "timeout after 10s" flag with an infinitely looping program and calling it a program that takes 10s to terminate)
@AaronMiller Some of those are in a gray area for me, but I think my acceptable list is roughly jMmṀvcfaSOoKWṠṡJ5bBT. I'm not sure about R--what's the default behavior without it?
You can't seriously argue that "vyxal, a complicated golfing languages with thousands of lines of code, becomes a totally distinct languages when you join the outputs with a newline"
The only two situations I'd consider two combinations of flags to be different is: 1. It uses a different version of the interpreter (where that's an actual version, and not "y'know, I'll update to include j by default, then revert with the next update 10m later"), or 2. you have to put a lot of work in to port over code written without the flag
If using a flag gives you something which can pretty trivially be changed into not using that flag, or vice versa, it is almost certainly not different enough
And I don't think any of Vyxal's flags (aside from r, maybe) fit that description
I'd consider the output of Vyxal j to be an array, not a string joined by newlines. If you're outputting as an array, and just using j for nicer formatting, I'm 100% fine with it (but you should probably move it out of the header). But if the question specifically wants a string with newlines, I would consider j to be cheating.
@RedwolfPrograms I think I come at it more from a language-design perspective. Some languages use 0-based indexing; other languages use 1-based. When you're designing a language, you have to pick one. But you could have picked the other. To me, those two possible choices lead to two different languages, just like a different set of builtins makes for different languages.
@DLosc Different indexing is one of the more gray area flags maybe, but I think it takes all of the fun out of golfing language design when instead of having to make hard decisions you give the user both options at no byte count cost
klein flags are totally fine IMO cuz the language functionality depends on a specific config but the core is still going to be the same, so the flags don't really "alter" the behavior, more so define (or rather select) what the behavior will be
@RedwolfPrograms And that's a fair point. I designed Pip back when a flag cost a byte. Putting behavior in a flag should cost something, IMO. But a) that's not the consensus anymore, and b) even back then you had slightly different versions of the same language being used (e.g. 05AB1E vs 2sable).
I've always considered the flag cost debate to be like the famous quote about democracy: "Flags being free is the worst way to count flags, aside from every other way we've tried"
@AaronMiller vcfarOoKṠDV5bBT are fine / probably fine, jLMmṀSWṡJ are grey area, and HsdClGgRṪ are cheating
basically, flags that alter I/O encoding etc are fine, and that are like for debug / alter interpreter timeout. flags that format the I/O are grey area because they are good for formatting but if the format is important it falls into the third category, which is just flags that take pre/post-computing out of the program
@WheatWizard I kind of like those answers, because I can downvote, and when someone inevitably complains about the downvote, I can point to "flag abuse IMO"
like the l flag is literally just taking 1 byte, the length command, and moving it from the code into the flags, which is just "-1 bytes cuz i said so"
however, i agree with caird here that it's still best to just count all these flags as free because we've had more issues with other ways
an interesting idea: if 1 flag = 1 byte then it'd be interesting to try to create a language where the same characters mean different things in the two halves so you can sort of shove 512 built-ins into your codepage
@RedwolfPrograms Additionally, having the capability to use flags but not doing so encodes a slight amount of information, so you'd still have an advantage if your languages uses flags even if you use weird math stuff in the scoring to compensate for this
Hmm... if Pip's list-formatting flags were considered cheating for e.g. ASCII art challenges, I think I could add a way to set the behavior in the program itself for 1 byte each...
@RedwolfPrograms Has anything new been brought up this time? Because TNB's talked about it lots of times before, and each time it's pretty much the same points
Pip's flags are great when you're trying to debug a long program, but using them to save bytes would be pretty generally agreed to be cheating from what people here have said so far
I say we make a different website for every set of flags for every language. That way, anti-flag-X-ers will have their site, anti-flag-Y-ers will have a site, anti-flag-XY-ers will have a site, etc. :P
Felt like crap for the past 2 days (no, it's not a hangover), and haven't been able to eat anything until this evening, so thought that going out tonight would be probably the worst decision I could make :P
@user Serious answer: "ana" is a preposition roughly equivalent to "up" in English, so to analyze something is to "break it up " into smaller parts. Non-serious answer: yes, absolutely. :P
canada gives us the worst of both worlds where we have 30+ (feels like 40) temperatures in the summer where people have fainted in my high school's stairwells before, and -30- (sometimes down to -40) temperatures in the winter where school has to be cancelled due to the frostbite hazard
school's only cancelled if there's like over a foot of snow and sometimes they only cancel the buses and then not school itself (just high school tho uni doesn't care lmao)
i don't think my school board did any one single overly atrocious thing but i've always been rather disappointed with them and the general student opinion seems to either be "i don't care" or "yeah it's not good" (or just "it totally sucks")
i heard about a school board that added masks into their dress code cuz texas still has those (and i think the gov't blocked a bill to ban them); do you know anything about that / if that even happened
anyway kinda sad that public safety has to be enforced by exploiting a policy designed to control people, because otherwise it'd be controlling people to enforce public safety
Usually nobody enforces the dress code that much, but I did have a teacher in 6th grade who'd walk through the hallways with a stack of office referals and a roll of duct tape :p
At my school masks aren't mandatory unfortunately
About half of people wear them from what I can tell
my university has a mask and vaccine mandate requiring proof of vaccination, lol. still uncomfortable with how close people get but i just stay farther away and it's fine; i'm only there once a week anyway. it's very nice tho
@RedwolfPrograms Easy way to fix that - get covid, pass it to her and your entire family to show them how bad it is, if they survive, they'll start wearing masks :P
@cairdcoinheringaahing Could you translate that into eagle wingspan per football for me, please? :P
we have an entire political party here campaigning on the "fact" that lockdowns, mask mandates, school closures, and "other authoritarian sanitary measures" haven't had any impact on the pandemic, and repealing vaccine mandates and covid testing
well it wasn't that they drove people to vote otherwise it's that they created an alternative to the conservative party (which I believe is pretty sensible in canada) for the crazy people thus pulling support and causing the other parties to win pluralities :P
@hyper-neutrino So, I did some extra reading on this, and it's related to Singmaster's conjecture, and that page actually gives a formula for calculating an arbitrary number that appears 6 times in Pascal's triangle :P
What's fascinating is that the formula uses Fibonacci numbers; \$\binom {F_{2i+2}F_{2i+3}} {F_{2i}F_{2i+3}}\$ for a non-negative integer \$i\$ will give a number that appears 6 times in Pascal's trinagle
