Re: Golf Scoring Idea

Benjamin Goldberg wrote in perl.golf :
> This might be a bit of a strange idea, but... suppose that for scoring,
> instead of using total number of bytes for the score, you used the total
> number of opcodes.  The B module, or one of the backends invoked through
> -MO=<whatever>, would be used for finding out this info.

Interesting idea... with less ops, a compiled perl program takes less
memory, and may run faster. Plus, it's a way to learn about the
internals. Would ops that have been optimized to nullops counted in the
final score ? Also, you'll need to standardize to a specific perl
version -- perl 5.8 + ithreads compiles to a different set of opcodes.

'perl -MO=Concise foo.pl | wc -l' should be enough if you don't discard
opcodes. (if not, we can hack a quick module B::CountOpcodes or
whatever. Duh, it would have to handle subroutines and BEGIN blocks
too...)

Just, please don't use the namespace B::Golf for it.

> You would have to forbid the various ways that code can be hidden from
> perl's introspection, but that shouldn't be *too* much of a hardship for
> golfers.