mdj wrote:
> On Feb 1, 9:25 am, "Michael J. Mahon"  wrote:
> 
>> IIRC, Nibble published these by the hundreds, though most of them were
>> not really "games", but demonstrations.  There were even books of
>> one-liners published!
>>
>> A line is limited to the length of the input buffer--I don't recall
>> the exact limit, but it's just under 256 characters, so one-liners
>> are very constrained.  There are several tricks for getting conditional
>> execution within a single line, since "IF" applies to the entire
>> remainder of the line.
>>
>> Think of one-liners as a kind of puzzle, rather than as a useful
>> skill, and you've got the picture.  ;-)
> 
> I remember typing in one example that rendered the Mandelbrot set in
> hires, then waiting the 5-6 hours for it to render, just because of
> found it ingenious :-)

A direct evaluation of the Mandelbrot set at hires takes about seven
hours whether it's a one-liner or not.  ;-)  I use it as a demonstration
of "embarrassing parallelism" for the AppleCrate--in fact, I used it at
KansasFest (though the demo was interrupted by my zapping it with ESD!).

With 16 processors running it, and "jobs" assigned by line number, it
get linear speedup, and runs in about 26 minutes--so the plan was that
it would finish by around the middle of my talk.  ;-)

> These days we have
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_International_Obfuscated_C_Code_Contest
> which carries on 'spirit' of the exercise. I however always thought it
> would be far more fun to have an International self-documenting code
> contest ;-)

Hear, hear!

I think that Knuth's Literate Programming was the best example of
code documentation that I've ever seen.  Dijkstra used to say that
any functioning code was like the tip of an iceberg in comparison to
the large amount of documentation required to justify it.  That sounds
about right, and would translate to 250-500 lines of commentary for
every 50 lines of code.

-michael

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