Re: Anti-golfing

On Sun, 27 Oct 2002, Phil Carmody wrote:

> > And there are no general programs to analyze general programs, so
> > whatever rules you specify, it will have cracks.
>
> Except if you add an artificial upper bound. Say 10 of each letter/number,
> and 20 of each punctuation character. I'm not saying it's a good idea, but
> it might just work (at all, that is, not well).

Maybe the trick would be to do things just like the French literary group
Oulipo does: use constraints in writing.

For the moment, the constraint was to be as short as possible. But there
are many others :
 - do not use a '$'
 - write the sorter program using no alphanumerics
 - alternate vowels and consons
 - write a palindromic program that passes so that reversed program
   solves a completely different problem
 - write a program that is exactlty 'n' character long
 - ...

The main problem with these constraints is to score the resulting program.

-- 
 Philippe "BooK" Bruhat

 All life affects us... even that which is far from our gaze.
                                    (Moral from Groo The Wanderer #59 (Epic))